TL;DR
- Josh Carter is a SOC manager at Expel who spent three years as a SOC analyst at another MDR provider before joining our team.
- His motivation is personal: he thinks about family members who are prime targets for phishing and AI voice scams, and he doesn’t want cybercriminals taking advantage of people who don’t have a technical background.
- He’s a self-taught, multi-instrument musician who’s still holding the line as a pancake guy (though a new waffle maker is testing his resolve) and a lover of triangle-shaped pizza.
Josh Carter’s path to cybersecurity started with a busted online forum. Back in college, while he was working through a management information systems degree, a disgruntled member of a small online community he was part of turned out to be skilled with back-end code and database injections. He rampaged through the group, exposing real names, birthdays, and email addresses. Nothing came of the data itself, but the incident stuck with Josh. If someone could do that to a community of 100 people, what terrible things were happening out in the real world? That question, combined with the wave of retail credit card breaches making headlines at the time, pointed him toward cybersecurity.
From help desk to SOC manager
After graduating, Josh took a help desk job at a corporate IT org, which gave him a foundation in troubleshooting both hardware and software. At the same time, he was working through a master’s in cybersecurity and picking up certifications, including Security+. That led him to his first real SOC job as an analyst at another MDR provider. He spent three years learning how attackers target devices and users to get money or information out of organizations.
Josh found Expel because of a mutual connection who’d already joined our customer success team. She and Josh had worked together for years, and what she sold him on was a culture of continuous improvement. At his previous job, even as a frontline manager, he’d run into limits on how much change he could actually influence. Expel was different: anyone could bring an idea to the table, follow through on it, and get real buy-in, even for something outside their job description.
“I’m a SOC manager. Am I only responsible for SOC improvements? No,” he says. “I’m responsible for thinking about all aspects and then communicating those ideas with the right people and getting their buy-in. That’s been my favorite part about Expel.”
Motivated by empathy
Ask Josh what keeps him motivated, and the answer isn’t abstract. He thinks about people who aren’t as technically savvy as folks in cybersecurity tend to be, including his own family members, who are susceptible to phishing campaigns of every kind, including AI voice-cloning scams designed to convince grandparents to send money to someone impersonating a relative.
“While yes, we are protecting businesses and other organizations, those organizations protect other people,” he says. “Knowing that I’m playing a small part in the grander picture really motivates me because I don’t want these nefarious people to take advantage of folks just because they don’t have the technical background that we do.”
Spending a day as a SOC manager
About 30% of Josh’s day has real structure to it. One-on-ones with his team of frontline analysts are a priority, both to check in as a human thing to do, and to create space for his analysts to give him feedback. He also spends time aligning the team on whatever’s top of mind that week, like a new attack vector, so that anyone coming back from a weekend can walk into an investigation already caught up.
The rest of his time has gotten a lot more customer-facing lately. Josh has learned that customers, and even prospects, respond well to hearing directly from the SOC manager who’ll eventually own their alerts. So he’s spent a lot of time on calls introducing himself, explaining how Expel operates, especially when it comes to communicating during critical incidents.
He also spends parts of his days asking new hires very important questions, which are a critical part of Expel culture. The original VIQ that still sparks debate among Expletives today is, “Is a hot dog a sandwich?” But in the SOC, they’re mixing it up (and keeping score). Their current debate: waffles or pancakes? (Editor’s note: Waffles are obviously the right choice here.) Josh says it’s a hotly debated topic with an active, ongoing tally—right now, waffles are in the lead.
Josh is on the record as a pancake guy, but a new waffle maker at home has him reconsidering. “There’s a nice crisp to a waffle, too,” he admits, while still holding the pancake line for now. He and his French-Canadian family go heavy on real maple syrup. For what it’s worth, he says there’s no such thing as overpouring it.
Fun fact and a very important question
Josh is a jack-of-all-trades when it comes to music. He taught himself to play the keyboard at six, and also played flute, French horn, trumpet, mellophone, and baritone horn through band in middle and high school. He picked up a free piano from Facebook Marketplace during COVID-19, and also plays guitar and violin. As for his collection of noise-makers, he has a goal: a room full of instruments his kids can pick up and play with whenever they want. (Editor’s note: As a fellow parent, I can make this joke: he’s collecting noise-makers for his noise-makers, if you will.)
As for Expel’s very important question tradition, we asked Josh whether he prefers his pizza in triangles or squares. He didn’t hesitate. “Triangle pizzas are better because you have an actual crust to hold on to,” he says, describing the fold technique that keeps toppings in place and hands clean. Square pizza, in his experience, means eating with a fork and knife, which he traces back to his wife’s Quebecois family, who also famously layer their toppings underneath the cheese instead of mixing them in. (Editor’s note: Eating pizza with a fork and knife should be a crime.)
While the goal of this interview wasn’t to create an impromptu food review, Josh couldn’t let the moment pass without an homage to poutine–he’s French-Canadian, after all.
