Kat Traxler is the Principal Security Researcher at Vectra AI, focusing on abuse techniques and vulnerabilities in the public cloud. Before her current role, she worked at various stages in the SDLC, performing web application penetration testing and security architecture design for Web, IAM, Payment, and Cloud Native Technologies.
Kat’s research philosophy directs her work to where design flaws and misconfigurations are most probable. This guiding principle leads her research to the intersection of technologies, particularly the convergence of cloud security and application security, and where the OS layer interfaces with higher-level abstractions.
Kat has presented at various conferences, including the SANS CloudSecNext Summit and fwd:CloudSec, on topics such as privilege escalation in GCP and bug-hunting in the cloud. In addition to her work at Vectra AI, she is a member of IANS Faculty and the Lead Author of the SANS SEC549 - Enterprise Cloud Security Architecture and holds multiple GIAC certifications. You can find her on the internet as @nightmareJS.