Staff

Founder

Matt Johnston

Matt has spent 25 years practicing Cybersecurity through many roles and across a wide set of contexts, as an employee of the businesses listed below. Within that time, he has supported small organizations like regional banks, major enterprises, Cybersecurity industry leaders, up to global fortune 100 companies, and numerous US government agencies. All of these experiences brought unique opportunities and challenges, upon which Matt has built his knowledge and expertise.

Matt’s professional career started in the year 2000 within the Defense Industrial Base (DIB) working for a US Defense Contractor that delivered the entire spectrum of cybersecurity services to organizations inside and outside of government. In this time he also supported the US Intelligence Community through his work in adversary research and information sharing. He specialized in nation state adversaries and developing effective defenses including countermeasures, threat detection analytics, and threat-focused operations programs.

While practicing security engineering, operations, incident response, and security architecture, Matt specialized in threat intelligence and the combining of people, process, and technology into the most effective ways to counter real-world threats. Data science was at the core of Matt’s work as he used analytics capabilities to analyze data, discover patterns, highlight indicators, and otherwise discern meaning from collected information. Matt’s entire career built upon this initial foundation.

The broad experience he gained early on led him to roles focused on research and capability & maturity consulting for CISOs and security leaders who needed guidance in how to build, sustain, and improve their information security programs. He also worked with product companies who were developing new solutions and needed guidance to steer them toward what was most effective technically, and usable operationally.

In 2013 he joined a major software company in the financial services sector where he was responsible for maturing their technical and operational cybersecurity capabilities overall. One of the highlights of this chapter of his experience was helping that organization truly understand their primary threat, and to organize their security program to focus on countering it.

In 2015, Palo Alto Networks hired their first CISO and set to the work of building a formal security program, of which Matt was recruited as a founding member within the core leadership team. While primarily responsible for building out the threat intelligence program for enterprise defense, Matt also served as a mentor to the Director of Security Operations, developing and guiding the strategy for the entire SOC program - people, process, technology, and facilities. His work in threat intelligence also provided strategic guidance and support to the Governance, Engineering, Security Education, Risk Management, and Product teams. Using research and data analytics, Matt focused on building operational capabilities that identified and elevated true threats that were otherwise hidden among the background noise of business operations.

In 2021, Matt was hired by Rubrik to help them as a tech startup build their information security program from the ground up. He was responsible for defining the mission while building and implementing the strategy for security operations which included threat research, threat detection, data analytics, investigations, and incident response. Matt focused his time at Rubrik on ensuring the security team had the proper foundation and trajectory toward building an optimized security practice for their context as a cloud-first organization.

Starting in 2022 at CrowdStrike, Matt was invited to lead cloud threat research and detection content development for a Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) product engineering team. In this role he managed a team of security researchers and engineers in the development of detection content that was focused on threat & risk management for cloud native services. Another data analytics heavy role in which he used big data platforms combined with risk management experiences, to focus on building relevant solutions for CSPM customers. This team was responsible for the end-to-end development of cloud risk management use cases, content, and code that was deployed to customers of CrowdStrike’s cloud security products.

During his tenure at CrowdStrike, Matt participated in multiple “next generation” data analytics projects which involved designing new architectures for handling data analysis at larger scales and among increasingly diverse data sets. In this time he was an active participant in examining the applicability of LLM and AI technology in various contexts.

Throughout his career, Matt was always bothered by two things: the cybersecurity industry had lost its mission as a fundamentally moral endeavor (a cause for good), and that people he knew kept encountering harm from the online world he was combatting professionally.

By founding Prative Security in 2025, Matt changed his focus from enterprise security toward helping individuals, families, small business owners, and our youth understand and counter their digital threats. His aim is to bring his decades of experience to everyone so that we are all empowered to defend ourselves against the vast array of threats that exist online.

Throughout these 25 years, Matt has worked as a Security Analyst and Incident Responder; a Security Engineer responsible for technology deployments, maintenance, and integrations; a Security Strategist responsible for the capabilities and maturity of cybersecurity programs at large enterprises; as an educator teaching staff about online threats; as an Operations Manager; has led Threat Intelligence practices that focus on researching and understanding the adversary; and as a Manager of a Security Product team; and always in applied data sciences through his heavy use of data analytics.

Through all this time, he has seen what works well in Cybersecurity because he has researched the problems, implemented the solutions, and managed the outcomes they produce.

You can review Matt’s professional profile and business experienced on LinkedID here.

Matt resides in San Diego County with his wife and their three daughters. They are a homeschool family and work diligently to bring all of life together. To this end, the entire family participates in Practive Security in various ways.