Amyn Gilani

Amyn Gilani enlisted in the Air Force in September 2004. He trained as an intelligence operator.

The country was three years past September 11, 2001. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were both under way, and the intelligence services were being reorganized around them. The 9/11 Commission published its report in July 2004, two months before he enlisted, and its recommendations shaped the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act, which created the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and was signed three months after he joined. The Air Force became a separate service in 1947, after the Army and the Navy, and it was at war in two countries when he joined.

His specialty was intelligence, and his assignment was the National Security Agency.

He served there from September 2004 to September 2010, six years.

The National Security Agency is a Department of Defense organization, and Fort Meade is an Army installation. The agency is one of its tenants. The Air Force assigns intelligence operators to its own units and to joint agencies. A joint tour is one in which a service member works for an organization outside their own branch. His assignment was one. The agency's workforce is a mix of civilians and military personnel, and the military personnel there work inside a civilian organization. Fort Meade sits between Baltimore and Washington.

His own line about the posting, on his own profile: "No, I didn't listen to your phone calls."

He left the Air Force in 2010 and stayed at the agency as a civilian. In 2011 he moved to Northrop Grumman as a cyber threat technical lead, supporting the agency, U.S. Cyber Command, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. Northrop Grumman is a defense contractor.

Goldman Sachs came in 2015. He was a vice president of technology risk there, and he built the bank's threat intelligence and red team capabilities from the ground up. A red team tests a company's defenses by trying to break them.

Booz Allen Hamilton followed in 2017. He was chief technologist for federal cybersecurity, helping government chief information security officers build better security programs.

Constella Intelligence came next, in 2018. He was vice president of product for 4iQ, building software that unmasked cybercriminals from open-source and cryptocurrency data, and 4iQ merged into Constella in 2020.

Then CounterCraft. He was the Spanish cybersecurity company's first employee in the United States and its chief operating officer. He took revenue from zero to $2.5 million in the first year and signed a $26 million federal contract in the second. The company joined the inaugural AWS Defense Accelerator, and Fast Company named it one of its 50 Most Innovative Companies for 2023.

He has led security programs at Group 1001 since 2023, first as director of threat management and now as assistant vice president and head of security threat intelligence. The firm manages $70 billion in assets, and his group runs threat intelligence, executive protection, cyber fraud fusion, and business risk intelligence for its investment teams. Executive protection is the work of keeping a company's executives safe.

He is also a co-founder and host of the Hacker Hoedown, a Dallas security mini-con with real-world challenges, barbecue, and drinks. He has published on attribution — the work of deciding who is behind an attack — and on credential exposure and on why attackers persist longer than the teams defending against them.

His view of the training side is plain: "Meaningful education and engagement requires thoughtfulness and trust. You can't outsource that responsibility to just software."

He holds a master's in intelligence analysis from Johns Hopkins, finished in 2015, and a bachelor's in history from the University of Maryland, finished in 2012.

He has built a threat intelligence program at a bank, a federal practice at a consultancy, an American market for a Spanish company, and a security group at a $70 billion firm. He lives in Dallas.