Michael Sikorski

Michael Sikorski has been appointed chief information security officer at Coinbase, as SecurityWeek recorded in its industry-moves roundup for the Week of July 6, 2026. He is also an adjunct assistant professor at Columbia University and previously served as CTO and vice president of engineering at Palo Alto Networks.

Career path

Palo Alto Networks' own author page for Sikorski lists his title there as CTO and VP of Engineering for Unit 42, the company's threat-intelligence and incident-response arm, and shows a run of blog posts and reports he wrote for the company between 2023 and 2025 on ransomware extortion, threat-intelligence sharing, and social engineering. SecurityWeek's brief profile adds that before Palo Alto Networks he also held vice president roles at Mandiant and FireEye.

RSA Conference's expert page describes him as a world-renowned expert in reverse engineering and the author of the best-selling book Practical Malware Analysis, crediting him with more than 20 years of experience working on high-profile incidents and leading research and development teams. That same page places an earlier stop at the National Security Agency before Mandiant, and confirms his teaching post at Columbia University.

Public research and testimony

Among the Palo Alto Networks posts credited to Sikorski is a 2024 piece on artificial intelligence and cybersecurity written for testimony to Congress, and a 2025 report on social engineering describing how cybercriminals and nation-state actors use the technique to attack organizations at scale.

The three sources reviewed do not state when Sikorski's tenure at Unit 42 began, so this profile does not attempt to date the start of his Palo Alto Networks years.