Miguel Maloney Thompson

My first steps were a stumble. I was trying to walk, lost my balance, and instead of falling on my face I fell into a running form. I've been running ever since, much to my parents' early despair. My life keeps repeating this over and over again, where my falls become another catalyst for an upgrade. I've also never been one to do one thing at a time, in one straight line. Maybe it's a curse, or a gift that needs tweaking for efficiency.

These days I work in layers. I'm a security engineer, a runner, a writer, and a believer, and I've stopped treating those as competing for the same plate. Part of my week goes to exploring ideas, hardening systems against the threats that slip past every other defense; the rest of it I'm on the road, or writing. It's one discipline worn in different ways: pay attention, prepare before you're forced to, and leave the thing better than you found it.

I was born in Jamaica and moved to Panama permanently in 2013 to live closer to my father's roots, a reset that pulled my life back into focus after years on the home-work-church treadmill. Since then I've spent over a decade leading IT and, since 2023, cybersecurity. I earned a postgraduate diploma in cyber security from the University of Liverpool, and eventually built the thing I kept wishing existed.

That thing is Masada Hardening. It's where I help businesses protect the layer that has to hold after every other defense has already failed, the web, and websites in particular, where most small and mid-sized companies are quietly exposed. At its center is WARM (Website Assessment of Risk Methodology), my way of scoring a site's real risk as it actually behaves, instead of ticking boxes once a year. Because of where I'm from, I build for the regulated markets: Panama, the wider Caribbean and Latin America, and Europe. (The full security work lives over at Masada Hardening.)

Away from the screen, I enjoy running, which is where I sharpen my discipline; I also enjoy rock climbing when possible. Writing is an old love that I've been neglecting and hope to do more of, as I did in the past, some of it faith-based, some secular, all of it an attempt to think clearly about life and explore those challenging questions that sometimes keep me up at night.

Whatever I'm doing (building, running, writing, listening to God, or seeking someone willing to give me an ear), the aim is the same: to leave the path I have taken better than I found it.