RVAsec 13

After a career in industrial controls (Honeywell) and another in fin tech (Capital One), I left corporate America to focus on community impact more than income, and founded IT4Causes, a nonprofit that helps other nonprofits with their technology challenges.  We're now entering our 10th year of serving nonprofits with segment-specific technology solutions, using a mix of paid nonprofit tech experts, skilled IT volunteers, and technology interns.

Security is obviously a huge part of what we do to ensure our for-purpose clients are protected from growing cyber threats. As all of our clients are... Read more

Roman Bohuk is co-founder and CEO of MetaCTF, a cyber skills platform that helps companies assess, recruit, retain, and upskill cyber talent. We specialize in competition-based exercises, such as on-demand labs, traditional jeopardy-style CTFs, and attack & defense CTFs that can be used for tool/skill training, secure coding, security awareness, and more.

Evan Booth is a builder and architect at Counter Hack, a company devoted to building fun and engaging challenges that educate and evaluate information security professionals. Armed with a profound fascination with how things are built, Evan has spent the past 20 years working on the creative, strategic, and engineering components of software and hardware projects for a wide variety of clients. Evan enjoys spending time with his family, taking stuff apart, and occasionally putting stuff back together again. ... Read more

Ever since he blew a capacitor installing a Cd drive and causing a small fire in his first self-built computer, Corey has been obsessed with computer systems and how they work. After 13 years in the Infosec industry wearing just about every hat, from being in a SOC to hunting threats in a CIRT to Security Engineering for customers, He is happily in a security engineering role protecting Virginians saving for the most important things to them, while wearing a cool t-shirt every day as per his manager’s request.

EMbeded software developer- C, assembler (mips)
AWS Admin
RH/Centos Admin
SQL developer, dbadmin (MySQL)
PHP, bash/tcsh

Network Security Engineer, firewalls, Palo Alto and Juniper

mobile device security
RMF lifecycle artifact management
Data Governance
Good places to fish
Incident Reporting

Jeremy has built his career around protecting assets in the most critical IT sectors. He started his career working in a Network Operations Security Center for the US Army. He then went on to work as a Network Security Engineer defending Dominion’s North Anna Nuclear Power Station. He also had the privilege to serve as a Senior Network Security Engineer/Architect at Genworth Financial. Currently Jeremy works as a Client Solutions Architect for Optiv focusing on named accounts in the mid-Atlantic region. He has presented at DefCon, UNC, JMU, ECPI, FBI Infragard and holds or has held CISSP, CISM... Read more

I enjoy golf and photography and duck hunting and traveling out West. I’m also a proud Dad and husband who believes in Family First. Grateful that our son played football at UVa for 5 years and was deeply involved with the ACC as a Student Athlete Chairman. He also just received his Masters. Great experience for our entire family and friends. Also enjoy SEC football as a UGa alum and love Athens Ga for its vibe and music. Our youngest son has a band and will be enjoying his second year at JMU. They will be traveling to UNC and South Carolina for gigs this Fall. I will be a roadie! Love it. He... Read more

IT Infrastructure and the secure enterprise

I am the Director of Threat Management for the Virginia IT Agency. My group is in charge of providing Incident Response, Digital Forensics, and Vulnerability scanning services to all ~65 Executive Branch agencies in the Commonwealth.  Additionally we happily volunteer our time, tools and knowledge to helping other VA public entities in their prevention and/or response to Cyber incidents.

Kevin Johnson is the Chief Executive Officer of Secure Ideas. Kevin has a long history in the IT field including system administration, network architecture and application development. He has been involved in building incident response and forensic teams, architecting security solutions for large enterprises and penetration testing everything from government agencies to Fortune 100 companies. In addition, Kevin is a faculty member at IANS and was an instructor and author for the SANS Institute.

I am the Director of Information Technology for a growing pharmaceutical company right here in RVA. I'm now in my 10th year of stewardship of the technology environment.  While I provide comprehensive oversight, management, and strategic direction of the entire I.T. unit for our organization, as a CISSP I have specific passions for cybersecurity, and as a certified PMP, I also appreciate project/portfolio management.

Outside of work, I enjoy spending time with my family, playing the occassional videogame (PS5/PSVR2), I also enjoy running; I just ran in the Dominion Riverrock James River Scramble (10k Trail-run), and of course I love good food and good drinks with good friends... Read more

I'm a small/ medium business IT admin looking to expand my awareness of cybersecurity and expand my network of contacts in the Greater Richmond Area.  My focus is on helping businesses discover opportunities that have been left on the table during SaaS implementation/ onboarding processes and offering subscription IT services.

Jake is the founder of RVAsec and was previously the CEO for Risk Based Security that provides vulnerabilities and data breach intelligence. He previously oversaw the operations of the Open Sourced Vulnerability Database (OSVDB.org) and DataLossDB. Kouns has presented at many well-known security conferences, including RSA, Black Hat, DEF CON, DerbyCon, Bsides, CISO Executive Summit, IEEE, FIRST, CanSecWest, InfoSecWorld, SOURCE and SyScan.

He is the co-author of Information Technology Risk Management in Enterprise Environments, Wiley, 2010, and The Chief Information Security Officer, IT Governa... Read more

Because of my disabilities, and now long they went undiagnosed, I don't know what to say or not say, to other attendees of the Spectrum of Opportunity online conference series. I expect hardly anyone, if anyone, will read this. But decades of harsh experience have taught me to get out in front of others' assumptions and interpretations about me.

My disabilities went undiagnosed for decades. I was in my twenties before I was finally correctly diagnosed with clinical depression, and my diagnosis of non=hyper attention deficit came a few years later. I didn't hear my autism diagnosis until my earl... Read more

Darryl MacLeod works for the Lares Advisory Services team and has over 20 years of experience in the IT security sector, having been responsible for developing, managing, and assessing information security programs for all levels of enterprise and government-level organizations. He has spoken at multiple conferences such as Security BSides St.John’s, GoSec, and the Texas Cyber Summit. He also sits on the Board of Directors for AtlSecCon and is the former lead organizer for Security BSides Cape Breton.

Kim is the founder and CEO of MAXX Potential, a tech talent incubator whose unique win-win-win business model has been recognized by Fast Company and Southern Living Magazine as one of the innovations changing the South. Prior to MAXX, Kim held global technology roles in Fortune 500 organizations as well as co-founding multiple startups and the rvatech/women conference. She also serves on the advisory board for the CodeRVA High School.

Ell Marquez is a proud Hacking Is Not and Crime and Operation Safe escape advocate. She has traveled the world for five years, educating security practitioners on subjects from on-prem infrastructure to the cloud and everything in between. I've traveled the world educating security practitioners on subjects from on-prem infrastructure to the cloud and everything in between.

"My greatest skill is the ability to listen and clearly communicate across all levels of the enterprise. My goal is to help organizations mature by creating highly effective security programs and teams that integrate seamlessly with company culture, vision, and mission." 

Mr. McOmie started in offensive security in 1994 and is a trusted advisor, security leader and mentor. With a career focus in offensive security and a strong technical background, he is recognized for his excellence in developing and executing enterprise security strategies and leading technical and tactical programs. He has founded and contributed to several industry leading organizations over his career including start ups, fortune 100 enterprises, and federal agencies. As an extrovert, he passionately supports the information security community, is a featured speaker at various conferences... Read more

Mr. McOmie started in offensive security in 1994 and is a trusted advisor, security leader and mentor. With a career focus in offensive security and a strong technical background, he is recognized for his excellence in developing and executing enterprise security strategies and leading technical and tactical programs. He has founded and contributed to several industry leading organizations over his career including start ups, fortune 100 enterprises, and federal agencies. As an extrovert, he passionately supports the information security community, is a featured speaker at various conferences... Read more

Hello! My name is Vince and I'm a professional moto technician and student of Information Technology. I'm currently working towards switching industries and taking my 10+ years of professional critical analysis and apply it to the field of information technology. I currently study IT at Reynolds community college in Richmond VA, set to graduate with an Associates of applied Science in May 2025. I am also enrolled to continue into a bachelor's program in Information Security at the University of Richmond, starting fall of 2025. I also hold several CompTIA certs, and a relentless tinkerer in my home... Read more

Samuel S. Panicker specializes in cyber security and data protection. He is currently the CISO for NTS with over twenty-six years of experience in the field. Sam has authored several security awareness programs for SANS and Black Hat including “A healthy level of paranoia”.

Ayush is a Cyber Security Engineer specialising in Cloud and Data Security, and DevSecOps practices. He loves to develop automation for security controls and processes. He has delivered talks at various conferences and security communities like GrayHat'20, and Cyber Security Global Summit to name a few. He also contributes to the OWASP Ranchi chapter as the Chapter Lead. He currently works at CRED as a cloud & data security engineer.

Jason Ross is a passionate cybersecurity expert with a diverse skill set, currently focused on building tools and processes to test the security of generative AI models & applications that use them. Jason's past work experiences include penetration testing, cloud security, and OSINT.

Jason is active in the security community, as a staff member and volunteer at several industry conferences. He is committed to education as an adjunct faculty member at the RIT Global Cybersecurity Institute, and is a frequent speaker at security events.

Jennifer Shannon is a Senior Security Consultant at Secure Ideas with a background in malware analysis, penetration testing, and training. An avid computer geek for most of her life, she began her journey in cybersecurity as a SOC Analyst where she showed an aptitude for both penetration testing and malware analysis. She has experience performing penetration tests against web applications, mobile software and platforms, and physical security assessments.

Jennifer discovered a passion for computers and problem solving at a young age. She bought Steal This Computer Book 2.0, by Wallace Wang, with one of her first paychecks, and became enamored with hacking and cyber security. While pursuing her degree she dedicated time to teaching computing skills to underrepresented minorities. She is the co-leader for the TOOOL chapter in Jacksonville, FL. Jennifer continues to be passionate about teaching and is eager to share her knowledge with others... Read more

Fashion & Style | Empathy | Security Awareness & Culture | InfoSec for the non-tech | Blogger | Starbucks | People-watcher | USAF Vet | GOSI | Sec+ | CySA+

Chris is the founder of RVAsec and Head of Innovation at Project Discovery, Inc. Chris has been in the security industry for 27 years, working in various research and security roles with Focal Point, HP (SPI Dynamics) and Capital One. He is the author of the “Nikto” web server assessment tool, which has been a top-rated free security tool since 2003, and several other OSS tools. Chris was also a founder and development lead of the Open Source Vulnerability Database (OSVDB) project.

Anthony is just someone that has a passion for helping people and shares that passion through cybersecurity.

Chris currently works for Palo Alto Networks in R&D, helping customers stay ahead of threat actors and helping our products stay customer focused. His experience with UEBA and IAM helped drive the ITDR module to not only focus on Identity based attacks, but also the entire Identity lifecycle helping to improve outcomes for customers and detections for Insider Threat programs across the globe. He loves talking to customers about SIEM, Security Operations, and the analyst experience which allows him to learn and adjust accordingly. Never an expert, always a student.

public cloud, compliance automation, cloud-native security, open hand drumming, 野孩子

Embedded engineer working professionally in the automotive controller and telematics space. Personal projects include some audio gear and the RVASec Badge project.

Jason Wonn is a results-focused information security leader with 30+ years of combined national intelligence, information assurance, and cyber threat intelligence expertise throughout the civilian and military sectors.  Jason is a “Richmonder” but works for Navy Federal Credit Union in Vienna, VA. He currently serves as a Cyber Action Officer, delivering table-top exercises and serving as a trusted incident response advisor to leadership during cyber crises. Prior to this position, Jason led the development of a cyber threat intelligence capability at both Navy Federal and The Walt Disney... Read more

Aqeel Yaseen transitioned into Offensive Security from over a decade of teaching yoga professionally, and is currently working with Blue Bastion Security. That might seem like a curious combination, but Pentesting and teaching yoga both help people cultivate awareness of blind spots, and find ways to learn and grow from that awareness. Aqeel has been teaching himself that art and skill of hacking by creating home labs, owning machines on HTB and Offsec's Proving Grounds, and participating in CTFs. He has already earned the Security+, OSCP, and OSWA certifications, and is currently working towards... Read more