Offensive operations
Red teaming, purple teaming, penetration testing, and adversary emulation.
Offensive Security · Incident Response · AI Research
Mike Schladt, PhD
Director of Offensive Operations and Incident Response at Unit 221B. Cybersecurity leader and researcher working across adversary emulation, DFIR, reverse engineering, and applied AI/ML.
About
Leading offensive security. Advancing applied AI research.
Mike is a cybersecurity and AI/ML leader with experience across defensive and offensive operations. As Director of Offensive Operations and Incident Response at Unit 221B, he leads work spanning red teaming, penetration testing, incident response, and adversary emulation.
His background includes security operations, DFIR, threat intelligence, reverse engineering, and adversary emulation across private and public sectors. He began his career as a Cyber Operations Officer in the United States Air Force and later served as Director of Incident Response at GE Power.
Mike earned his PhD through the University of Cincinnati's College of Engineering and Applied Science. His research connects AI/ML, malware behavior analysis, and software improvement.
Focus areas
Work at the intersection of operations and emerging technology.
Incident response
Security operations, threat intelligence, DFIR, and response leadership.
Reverse engineering
Malware analysis and reverse engineering informed by operational telemetry.
AI/ML research
Malware behavior classification and LLM-guided genetic improvement of software.
Selected publications
Research in applied AI, malware analysis, and software evolution.
2026
LLM-Seeded Genetic Improvement: Hierarchical AST Evolution with Multi-Level Donor-Code Transplants
Michael Schladt and John C. Gallagher · 2026 IEEE Conference on Artificial Intelligence (CAI) · pp. 1579–1586
2025
Comparative Analysis of Neural Network Architectures for Telemetry-Driven Malware Behavior Classification
Michael Schladt and John Gallagher · 2025 IEEE 12th International Conference on Data Science and Advanced Analytics (DSAA) · pp. 1–10