With the rising reliance on digital platforms and the explosion of cyber threats, cybersecurity has become one of the fastest growing and most crucial fields in IT.

Emerging threats, such as sophisticated ransomware, social engineering and AI-powered cybercrime are making the cybersecurity landscape increasingly complex and dynamic, requiring organizations to adopt proactive and adaptive security measures. RBC continues to prioritize its investment in technology and security solutions to stay ahead of these rapidly evolving threats. With that, RBC has a team of cyber security experts who challenge and assess the effectiveness of our enterprise cyber security program and gather insight into our real-world ability to detect, prevent, and respond to cyber security incidents.

Milos Stojadinovic, RBC Distinguished Engineer, leads a global team of 35 experts who are responsible for the bank’s adversary emulation, threat hunting and threat modelling capabilities. This team is at the forefront of the cyber security threat landscape – developing offensive cyber security services and creating hunting programs that effectively detect advanced threats in cyber and digital spaces. Consistently focused on the offensive security space, they use their knowledge to secure organizations through their deep understanding of how to ‘break in’.

A growing team of experts

This team is highly curious and deeply technical on both offensive and defensive spectrums of cyber security: “On the technical spectrum, we need deep subject matter experts within cyber security; they need to know how these systems work at an intimate level to understand how they can be attacked and defended. On the other end of the spectrum, we need to build partnerships, earn trust, establish relationships, and effectively execute our services, and communicate our insights to a growing list of technical, non-technical, and executive stakeholders. This takes a very different skillset than those that focus on deep technical knowledge,” says Stojadinovic.

Testing our offense and defense

Having a holistic view of the organizations cyber security program is imperative to protect it from cyber threats. An organization that doesn’t have strong offensive capabilities is significantly hampered in its ability to understand adversary behaviour, has a reduced understanding of attack preparedness and would not have a stimulus to allow its defenders to exercise their skills, their tools, and their processes. RBC’s focus on strong defensive capabilities has resulted in a cyber security program that can identify a broad variety of threats that operate outside of the visibility of its control stack and develop novel solutions to protect the organization, clients and employees.

“I’m proud of what we’ve built,” says Stojadinovic. “The work they do is difficult to replicate not only due to skillset, but due to our strong culture focused on continuously innovating and pushing the envelope on the value we can bring to the organization.”

This article offers general information only and is not intended as legal, financial or other professional advice. A professional advisor should be consulted regarding your specific situation. While information presented is believed to be factual and current, its accuracy is not guaranteed and it should not be regarded as a complete analysis of the subject matter discussed. All expressions of opinion reflect the judgment of the author(s) as of the date of publication and are subject to change. No endorsement of any third parties or their advice, opinions, information, products or services is expressly given or implied by Royal Bank of Canada or its affiliates.