Austin A. DeFrancesco has more than a decade of experience in cybersecurity and business IT spanning finance, manufacturing, and healthcare sectors.
He has partnered with consulting firms and internal teams in roles that include system administrator, security architect, offensive capability developer, red team operator, penetration tester, and detection engineer. Austin's strategic and technical expertise has guided organizations toward informed decisions and operational excellence.
Origins
His passion for cybersecurity began in 2003 when his father brought home a Dell Alienware Area-51 desktop computer. That spark, coupled with countless middle and high school evenings spent writing papers on security and cyber policy as homework and presenting as guest lectures, set the tone for a career built on curiosity and rigor.
By 2013 he was already in the field, spending summers inside local IT departments, building operational intuition, and even launching a server rental venture spanning the US, UK, and Australia on a custom LAMP stack and content delivery network (CDN).
Experience
Austin leads detection engineering for a global enterprise, guiding a team that ships detection-as-a-service, automates multi-cloud rule deployment, and weaves AI-driven SOAR practices into daily operations. He owns the detection-as-code pipeline, builds content in Python, and advises product teams on modernizing defenses with telemetry, threat intelligence, and automated incident response.
His background spans both offensive and defensive operations—running red-team campaigns, building custom tooling for exploit development, and driving purple-team exercises that pressure-test infrastructure, medical devices, and IoT ecosystems. Earlier in his career, he delivered penetration tests, hardened critical infrastructure environments, and designed malware-analysis pipelines, experience that now anchors his approach to resilient detection strategy.
Community
He enjoys giving back by providing precise technical insights, especially through security research and writing. You can find more of Austin's work at https://blog.defcesco.io/.