About

About Zachary Zbranak

Zachary Zbranak has more than seven years of professional experience as a Threat Intelligence Analyst and private Threat Intelligence Contractor. He is a SANS-certified Threat Intelligence Analyst specializing in North Korean advanced persistent threats (APTs), network attacks, and trend reporting.

His responsibilities include establishing a network of intelligence sources, both proprietary and open source (OSINT), writing and editing network detection rules based on collected data, and generating actionable intelligence reporting for security operations center (SOC) analysts, senior managers, and government cybersecurity organizations.

In 2024, after working for a few companies, Zbranak founded Laser Tiger Security LLC and is also writing a book on North Korean cyberattacks.

His Technical Skills

Zbranak has a working knowledge of various computer languages, including Python, Java, C++, C#, R, and Microsoft Visual Basic. His skills include using incident-response software Splunk, YARA, Snort, i2 Analyst Notebook, and Wireshark and intelligence platforms ThreatConnect, FireEye, Flashpoint, Recorded Future, and Intel471.

Zbranak’s Professional Career

Before starting his own company, Zbranak worked for Recorded Future for a few years as a Team Lead/Senior Threat Intelligence Analyst, managing a globally distributed team of eight intelligence analysts. He also delivered regular and bespoke reporting for over 65 clients, including daily briefings, long-term trend analysis, and executive briefings across multiple industry verticals and global regions. The total value of reports delivered was about $12 million.

Additionally, Zachary Zbranak scoped, researched, analyzed, and wrote original tailored intelligence for clients with audiences ranging from highly technical security professionals to C-suite level executives. He reviewed analyses performed by other senior and junior analysts before client delivery. He created original research highlighting cybersecurity trends across Recorded Future’s internal modules and demonstrated the value added for potential clients that these modules provide.

Zbranak worked with internal stakeholders to create automation and documented workflows to increase the efficiency of team processes. He also mentored junior analysts on intelligence collection, aggregation, and the production of finished intelligence products.

While at Recorded Future, Zbranak was recognized for his work with an employee of the quarter award.

Providing Insights into Top Threats

He and his colleagues at Recorded Future participated in a webinar series, “The Top Threats Targeting Your Brand: Combat Credential Exposure with Intelligence.” In part one of the series, Zbranak and his colleagues spoke about domain abuse, how threat actors target brands, and how these threats impact trust. They provided guidance on detecting and responding to these risks before damage occurs.

Zbranak Began His Career at JP Morgan Chase & Co

While attending university, Zbranak was a Vulnerability Management Intern at JP Morgan Chase (JPMC) in the summer of 2016. He collaborated directly with teams across various lines of business to identify and patch vulnerable systems in the network.

After graduating in 2017, Zbranak joined JP Morgan Chase in New York, working for three years as a Threat Intelligence Analyst. His responsibilities included processing internal and external intelligence to assess impact, performing threat hunts to determine internal scope, and generating reports across cyber teams to mitigate threats. He built automation into the threat intelligence platform to sort and enrich raw data from various intelligence feeds.

While at JPMC, Zachary Zbranak also performed investigations on behalf of FS-ISAC member firms to provide actionable intelligence across the financial services industry, implemented MITRE’s ATT&CK framework across all existing intelligence and future ingestion to offer a real-time view across cybersecurity teams to guide threat hunting, and established standard operating procedures to ensure parity of data ingestion and reporting across global threat intelligence teams.

His Education

Born in 1995 and raised in the Northern Delaware, South Eastern Pennsylvania region, Zbranak attended Salesianum High School. He then attended the University of South Carolina and graduated with a degree in Computer Information Systems and a minor in Business Information Management. An excellent student, Zbranak had a 3.4 GPA.

A Love of Ice Hockey, American History, Photography and the Outdoors

While at Salesianum High School, Zbranak was the hockey team’s captain and

won the Hobby Baker Award, a national-level award with a winner in each state. He also coached Salesianum varsity and junior varsity ice hockey for three years. The team won the league championship and the Flyers Cup with an undefeated season during one of the years in which Zbranak was the coach.

Zbranak still enjoys playing hockey. He also enjoys studying American history, photography, and being in the outdoors.

 Giving Back: Making a Difference

 Each year, Zbranak donates to the hockey team at Salesianum High School. He also taught

Confraternity of Christian Doctrine (CCD) at St. Mary’s of the Assumption in Hockessin, Delaware, for four years and donated to the Human Trafficking Awareness (HTA) Range Day for the past two years. HTA Range Day aims to educate the community about the issue and raise funds for organizations that combat human trafficking through participation fees or donations.