My path into security wasn't conventional. I started in Barcelona supporting professional audio equipment at Bose, then moved to Cork where I spent five and a half years at Apple. I went from Enterprise T3 — deep in MDM, XSAN, macOS Server, and business infrastructure — to iCloud Security Engineering. Those Apple years gave me something most security professionals don't have: a genuine systems foundation. Unix environments, enterprise-scale infrastructure, an understanding of how technology behaves at its core. It's the layer underneath everything I do in incident response today.
The move to BlackBerry's Security Operations Centre was where security became everything. I was analysing real attacker behaviour across a diverse customer base, providing IR support on live incidents, and feeding intelligence into threat hunting operations. But just as important was the human side — coordinating across teams, mentoring junior analysts, learning that great incident response is as much about communication and composure as it is about technical precision.
OpenText is where the work grew in scope and depth. As Principal Incident Response, I was managing the full lifecycle of security incidents across global commercial and corporate environments — with a particular focus on GDPR and EU regulatory requirements. Digital forensic investigations collected and analysed in a legally defensible manner. Executive briefings that translate technical findings into clear business impact. After-action reviews that make the next incident go better than the last. Three and a half years of doing this at scale sharpened every dimension of the craft.
Today I'm Staff Information Security Engineer at Proofpoint, continuing to work at the intersection of detection, response, and the increasingly AI-shaped future of this field.
I built The Digital Sentinel because I've watched AI go from interesting experiment to genuine force multiplier in IR workflows — and most practitioners still aren't using it. Not because they can't, but because nobody has handed them the practical starting point. Here's a prompt, here's what it produces, here's how to adapt it to your environment. Copy it, run it, make it yours. No vendor pitch. No sponsored content. Just guidance from someone who does this work every day.