Meet Nye Prior: C7’s Senior Manager

I’m pleased to introduce our next team member in our ongoing series highlighting the rock star members of C7. Meet Nye Prior, Senior Manager for the Container 7 team!

Over Nye’s time at immersive they have evolved from an incredibly talented red teamer with a great understanding of how to engage learners in content, to a key leader within the team. They have led the team in a number of ways over the last few years and recently made the jump to leading a team of talented security professionals day to day, using their expertise to further grow their impact and share their wisdom for the benefit of our team and our customers.

Since joining Immersive in 2021, Nye has predominantly worked on expanding the company’s offensive security content and now leads a core part of the Container 7 team. 

Prior to Immersive, Nye spent several years as a red teamer at a cybersecurity consultancy, executing scenario-based attacks – such as data exfiltration and credential theft – to simulate real-world threat actors. In this role, they evaluated how effectively clients' security teams detected, investigated, and responded to incidents, ultimately producing detailed technical reports and leading debriefing sessions to explain attack paths and remediation strategies. They managed client engagements throughout their full lifecycle: defining objectives, communicating risk to executive leadership, and tracking emerging threat-actor tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) to keep advisory methodologies current. 

Nye is also an experienced educator, having spent several years teaching Computer Science before joining the world of offensive security. 

Take a look at our Q&A with Nye and make sure to watch their video!

What’s the biggest shift in the cyber threat landscape that defenders aren’t paying enough attention to?

We’ve spent years teaching people to spot phishing by its tells: spelling mistakes, odd formatting, a sender address that’s slightly off. That made us overconfident, because AI has wiped those tells out. 

Attackers can now produce messages that are polished, personalized, and realistic enough to fool almost anyone who isn’t a security professional. The biggest threat isn’t a clever technical attack on an AI system. It’s one employee clicking a link that looks exactly as it should. Once an attacker is in, AI speeds up everything that follows, so the controls guarding the front door matter as much as ever. 

We must strengthen MFA and identity controls, and train people for a world where the obvious red flags are gone.

What’s one lesson you’ve learned from studying attackers that every security team should know?

My background is in pentesting and red teaming, so I’ve spent a lot of time thinking like an attacker and watching some of the best at work. The lesson that stuck with me is that you’ll probably underestimate how creative attackers can be. Being the strongest technically matters less than thinking outside the box. 

A good example is attackers collecting small, random bits of information about a person and piecing them together into a profile. On their own, those details mean nothing. Put together, they make a personalized phishing attack that feels completely legitimate. 

There’s no easy fix. People need to stay alert, and when a message pressures them to act fast, that pressure is the cue to slow down.

What excites you most about what C7 is building, and what impact do you hope the team will have?

What excites me most is that we’re at the forefront of teaching everyone to use AI safely. All organizations are using AI now, so people need somewhere they can practice and experience it where nothing can go wrong. 

I’m especially excited about our AI purple teaming work, which brings red and blue content together – AI systems are being put in everywhere, and teams need to know both how to attack them and how to defend them. Our content lets them practice both sides so they can properly test the AI systems they rely on. 

The impact I hope we have is simple: people using AI with confidence because they’ve already seen what happens when it goes wrong, in a place where it couldn’t hurt anyone.

If you weren’t working in cybersecurity, what would you be doing instead?

I’d be working with animals. Being out in nature and helping wildlife all day sounds close to perfect. And it overlaps with security more than you’d think; you spend your days watching closely, learning what normal behavior looks like, and spotting the moment something’s off. The difference is that animals are usually easier to read than attackers.