Steven Kapinos
Vice President of Cognitive Cyber, ManTech
Steven Kapinos’ team recently completed the development of a novel Insider threat capability meant to help provide full context to investigators. This is particularly important in zero trust environments, which deploy per-user encryption keying.
They also employed a collaborative approach between their cyber defenders and insider threat personnel. In a zero trust world where adversaries will increasingly co-opt legitimate user accesses, this collaborative approach ensures investigators have full context ⏤ and can quickly transition investigations between teams.
“Under Steve’s leadership, we are deploying cybersecurity systems and solutions that identify and stop sophisticated attacks on contact ⏤ at speed and scale,” said Eric Brown, vice president and division manager of the innovative security solutions mission, Cyber & Intelligence Solutions Group at ManTech. “ManTech builds AI into everything we do. In the cyber arena, our goal is to keep the U.S. government lightyears ahead of hostile nation states determined to penetrate systems that are vital to national security.”
Why Watch
In 2023, Kapinos and his team are integrating ManTech’s cyber expertise into their AI and digital engineering services, delivering fast, defensible and resilient solutions. Leading the Cognitive Cyber group since 2020, Kapinos has been an early thinker about AI’s impact and the importance of its responsible implementation. His team uses a threat-informed approach and open implementation to leverage multiple models in their assessments.
“Two thoughts frequently come to mind,” Kapinos said. “The first is, ‘What’s next?’ Often in cybersecurity there is an idea that once you address an issue you won’t need to worry about it again. This is never the case because the adversary adjusts.
“The second: ‘Once you understand that premise, how do you improve the process of identifying the change in adversary behavior when it happens?’ Which leads to a quote ⏤ ‘Why are you storing data if you aren’t doing anything to operationalize and derive insight from it?’ At ManTech we’re helping customers leverage data insights to effectively manage the evolving cyber threat landscape.”