- Joined Cognition
- Oct 2026
- How they joined
- With Corridor
- Before Corridor
- AmazonSecurity Engineer II
- Status
- Current
- Joined Cognition as Member of Security Staff when Corridor (AI-native code security startup co-founded by Jack Cable and Ashwin Ramaswami) joined Cognition on 2026-10-28 to take Devin Security 'to the next level'; Corridor's blog names Cognition President Russell Kaplan (an early Corridor advisor), CSO Alex Stamos and CTO Steven Hao as the leaders the team works with.Oct 28, 2026
- Jack Cable announced Galligan joining Corridor as Security Engineer on 2026-05-20, writing verbatim: "Matt and I first worked together at CISA, where he was the only person to beat me in the President's Cup hacking competitions" and "Most of his career has been on the offensive side from months-long red team engagements, vulnerability research and pentesting government systems."May 20, 2026
- Was listed as Corridor's 'Head of Security' on corridor.dev/about alongside co-founders Jack Cable (CEO, ex-CISA Secure by Design lead) and Ashwin Ramaswami (CTO, Stanford AI researcher), in a team of under ten people.2026
- Corridor launched 'Security Enforcement for long-running agents' for teams running Devin, Claude Code, Codex and Cursor on 2026-09-30, a month before the Cognition deal; Galligan reposted it.Sep 30, 2026
- Posted on LinkedIn about the DEF CON 34 work, verbatim: "For DEFCON 34 Jack Cable and I spent some time examining weaknesses in Agentic code triage, and what we found was pretty interesting." and "No \"Advanced Nation-State\" level threats, no complex obfuscation, just good old social engineering!"Aug 24, 2026For DEFCON 34 Jack Cable and I spent some time examining weaknesses in Agentic code triage, and what we found was pretty interesting. Across all providers tested and all commercial models available to us, we developed some techniques that allowed untrusted internet users to reliably coerce agents to run malicious code WITHOUT checking to see if it was safe. We also managed to exfiltrate secrets
- Pitched Corridor publicly on 2026-06-05, verbatim: "In 2026 if you are a pen-tester or security engineer, you probably have 4X the code to cover since last year, and if you are lucky your security team didn't get cut in half."Jun 5, 2026In 2026 if you are a pen-tester or security engineer, you probably have 4X the code to cover since last year, and if you are lucky your security team didn't get cut in half. More of the code than ever is brand new, and was thrown into prod two weeks ago. Corridor legitimately cuts vulnerabilities before they ever make it to PR review, then gives your security team the tools to target the specifi
- Public headline says "Member of Security Staff at Cognition".
- Credited on 14 published vulnerability advisories in the GCVE/CIRCL credits index, 4 of them under 'Matthew Galligan, CISA Rapid Action Force (RAF)'.
- Holds OffSec Certified Expert 3 (OSCE3), issued 2023-02-28, which certifies exploit development, advanced web-app source review and pentesting against hardened systems.Feb 28, 2023
- I am an avid breaker of things and always excited to start up a new project! I have had a lot of experience building out security tooling and occasionally pull off some cool hacks!; this comes from the profile summary and preserves the person's own positioning.
- Earned a BS in Computer Science from University of Illinois Springfield (2014-2018) while already working as a Navy software engineer.2018
- Previous roles include Head of Security at Corridor; Security Engineer II at Amazon; Rapid Action Force Engineer at Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency; Software Lead / Cybersecurity Expert at Naval Information Warfare Center Pacific; CAMO - Principal SWE at Naval Information Warfare Center Pacific; Overmatch Software Armory - Cybersecurity Architect at Naval Information Warfare Center Pacific; IACT - Principal SWE at Naval Information Warfare Center Pacific; Software Engineer / Oracle Database Administrator at Lockheed Martin.
Routinely pen-testing 100,000+ production services Vulnerability Research and Development APT-Style long-term engagements focused on evading detection Developed large-scale payload delivery and reporting infrastructure
Built a few noteworthy NIWC projects from the ground up. Enjoying working grassroots style with emerging technologies and making interesting things. I'm currently heavily into Cybersecurity and am looking for new ways to further my professional development.
Lead development for the CAMO cybersecurity system, interfaced with stakeholders, and developed development & deployment roadmaps. Served as the Cybersecurity Expert for the Tularosa human subject study, and developed automated tools (OCR, network analysis, etc) to make sense of large amounts of attacker data.
Developing & Evangelizing modern DevOps pipelines and creating cybersecurity tooling for Navy's OSA
For DEFCON 34 Jack Cable and I spent some time examining weaknesses in Agentic code triage, and what we found was pretty interesting. Across all providers tested and all commercial models available to us, we developed some techniques that allowed untrusted internet users to reliably coerce agents to run malicious code WITHOUT checking to see if it was safe. We also managed to exfiltrate secrets
In 2026 if you are a pen-tester or security engineer, you probably have 4X the code to cover since last year, and if you are lucky your security team didn't get cut in half. More of the code than ever is brand new, and was thrown into prod two weeks ago. Corridor legitimately cuts vulnerabilities before they ever make it to PR review, then gives your security team the tools to target the specifi
