Sean Gallagher used to be a reporter. Now he’s a spy.

OK, fine. Gallagher, of Baltimore, is not out there dodging lasers in secret rooms or chasing airplanes mid-takeoff like Tom Cruise in a “Mission: Impossible” movie. But at 55, the veteran technology journalist traded in his press pass for a new gig: fighting cybercrime.

Though his weapons of choice are a keyboard and decades of knowledge and research skills rather than hand-to-hand combat, he’s still dedicated to saving the world from nefarious villains attempting to steal money and information, all while sitting in the office of his Hampden home assisted by his cat, Zita.

“It’s a mixture of everything I’ve done,” Gallagher, now 60, said of his current gig as principal threat researcher for British cybersecurity company Sophos. After three decades of writing about “everything that can go wrong” in the world of the web, he made the decision to actually do something about it.

I was intrigued by Gallagher’s job not only because it’s so crucial in this age of increasing cyber threats, but because he’s part of a growing trend of people in their 50s deciding to change careers at a time when some of their peers are gearing up for retirement. The common reasons for such a drastic shift mirror Gallagher’s: a chance to make more money, increased autonomy and a greater sense of purpose.

After years at the Condé Nast publication Ars Technica, including a decade as its information security and national security editor, Gallagher felt he’d been promoted as far as he could go. Looking for a new job in his mid-50s was admittedly scary, he said, but “I knew I couldn’t keep going the way I was going.”

His story resonated with me personally: At 49, after decades in journalism, I took a non-newsroom communications job when we moved from Florida to Baltimore. I was not good at it, but I gave it a shot. I’m so impressed with adults who make the decision to take their lifetime of knowledge in a different direction.

I asked Gallagher to explain, for the layperson, the difference between web security and cybersecurity. The former, he said, is “the technology involved in a web page and the ways in which it can be manipulated” while the latter is “everything that has to do with humans using technology — everything you touch, from your phone, to sending text messages on a dumb phone, to the ATM.”

Now that got my attention.

We’re always being warned how everything we use that’s connected to the Internet can be out to get us. Raised in the burgeoning days of technology in the 1980s and 1990s, our generation’s computer-related pop culture consisted of films like “War Games” and “2001: A Space Odyssey,” where computers were used for evil. “I have always been interested in the ways that technology can be abused, and how you can bend it to your will,” he said. It’s a good thing he’s using that knowledge to help instead of hurt.

Gallagher has always been interested in both technology and being a reporter, even as a kid growing up in New York state. “I would interview my brother on a tape recorder, and thought I was gonna be a man-on-the-street journalist-type of deal,” he said, while also being interested in “national affairs-type stuff.”

He went to the University of Wisconsin-Madison on a United States Navy scholarship that required him to enlist for four years after his 1986 graduation. During his time in the armed forces, he had opportunities to learn about the tech field. He then leveraged that knowledge as a freelance writer for various publications, including writing the game manual for a computer game called “Gunship 2000.″

His work included a stint at a New York-based tech business magazine called Baseline, for which he interviewed survivors from the World Trade Center office of Cantor Fitzgerald for the first issue in 2001. Gallagher choked up showing me the cover over a Zoom call. As his expertise grew, he also appeared regularly on the radio with local broadcast legend Marc Steiner.

While at tech news website Ars Technica, Gallagher started researching phishing kits, where scammers create a fake web page for a known brand or company in an effort to get victims to enter personal information that can be stolen. He interviewed white hat hacker David Helkowski, who was investigated for breaching a University of Maryland server. While doing research for the story, Gallagher went down a rabbit hole that led to him finding a web shell, a malicious script that aids in infiltrating web systems for attack, that was “run by a Middle Eastern hacker to host malware,” he said. “I’m tempted to delete things, but I don’t want to hack back, you know?”

At that point, his wife, Paula, the adult and community engagement specialist for Baltimore County Public Library, came into the room. “She sees me laughing and says, ‘What are you doing?’ I said, ‘I’m on this bad guy’s computer gathering information,’” Gallagher remembered. “And she said, ‘Could you get paid more to do that for somebody else than Ars Technica pays you?’ I said, ‘I don’t know? Maybe?’” Gallagher recalled, admitting “these were skills I had just learned yesterday.”

“I was committed to being a journalist, so that people knew about these things so that they didn’t happen,” he said. But eventually he became frustrated that he was writing the same stories “over and over again.”

With his wife’s encouragement, as well as speaking and training gigs in the industry that made him a respected voice, he started looking around for a new job and joined Sophos in early 2020. Since then, he’s had various promotions, culminating in his current position.

While technical, Gallagher’s work as a threat researcher sounds like the basis of a scam documentary. For instance, he was involved in the five-year investigation that Sophos recently announced into groups of Chinese-based operatives targeting its firewalls and servers.

And last year, he infiltrated a so-called “pig butchering” scam, which he describes as a “technology-based con game” in which the victim is convinced to take advantage of an opportunity that will make them money. In this case, he spent about a month chatting on Telegram with a woman who claimed to be a Malaysian wine entrepreneur living in Vancouver. She had a “sob story” about being cheated on by her best friend and risking losing everything. But hey, her aunt was an expert in cryptocurrency. Would he like to know more?

Of course, none of this was real. Gallagher geolocated the photos to Cambodia, not Canada, and discovered that the operators of the scheme had Chinese origins. The crypto windfall did not exist — which he suspected — but to “someone who is lonely” and doesn’t know they’re being taken, these scams are quite effective. The Federal Trade Commission reported earlier this year that “romance” scammers had taken in more than $1 billion in 2023.

Gallagher’s pleased not only that he gets to stop bad guys, but that he’s found a career in which he feels valued.

“I had gotten more positive feedback in the first three months of this job than in the nine years I was at my old one,” he said. At the end of the day, having that appreciation is worth more than money. Although making a lot more money’s nice, too.