Katie Nickels

Katie Nickels is a Director of Threat Intelligence, where she brings a passion for educating as she provides actionable insights on identity-based threats. With over a decade of experience in the cybersecurity industry, she previously led intelligence, research, and hunting teams at Red Canary, and also served as the Threat Intelligence Lead for the MITRE ATT&CK team. Outside of Okta, Katie teaches FOR578: Cyber Threat Intelligence for the SANS Institute and acts as a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council.

Esteban Guillardoy and Katie Nickels

September 8, 2026

Hunting Vulnerabilities Using Frontier Models

Okta used early access to GPT 5.5 Cyber Preview and Anthropic's Mythos Preview to hunt vulnerabilities in our own codebase. The big lesson: agents alone generate noisy leads, but pairing them with human experts who steer investigations produces real, high-confidence findings, plus a reusable pipeline architecture for future AI-driven security work.