BSides Peoria

Nick Schroeder is a Sr. Principal Threat Intelligence Analyst @ Mandiant/Google, focusing on custom intelligence curation, adversary tracking, and analysis. Nick previously held roles leading incident response engagements & IR teams, consulting, threat hunting, and penetration testing in the federal space. Nick enjoys forensics, malware analysis, and tooling.

Cody has over a decade of experience working with Red, Blue, and Purple cyber security teams, including countless Incident Response and Red Team engagements.

Kretsinger currently provides security research, expert advice, and advisory services to the Managed Service and Security Provider community at Galactic Advisors. Cody helps MSPs and MSSPs strengthen their own security, develop educational security content, and Research & Development for automated Penetration Testing tools, focused on adversarial tactics.

Cody previously worked as the Security Manager with a leading IT and cybersecurity company in Central Illinois providing Red and Blue Team services.

An avid cybersecurity professional, Cody has a passion for guiding information security, including speaking on numerous Cybersecurity topics and his time in LulzSec.

Anthony joined Pearl Technology in 2021 and is responsible for overseeing all aspects of the company’s business strategies and cybersecurity objectives.

He has more than 22 years of experience across public, private, and non-profit organizations. As a major with the Air National Guard in Peoria, Anthony serves as Commander, Cyber Operations Officer. He is an accomplished technology professional with experience in strategic planning, project management, and cybersecurity and one of the Peoria area’s 40 leaders under 40. In addition to his proven success, Anthony has the following certifications: CISSP, CCSP, CIO, CCNA, Sec+, ITIL, and 6 Sigma. Anthony also holds a Master’s of Science, with a CIO concentration from NDU College of Information and Cyberspace.

Anthony and his wife, Cristen, live with their three children in Central Illinois. His hobbies include aviation, golf, coaching hockey, and all things technology.

Charles Herring is co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer at WitFoo. WitFoo was founded to enable the sharing of information and operations across the craft of Cybersecurity. Charles leads research and development of the WitFoo Precinct platform that utilizes Apache Cassandra as a fundamental component in its architecture. Precinct ingests trillions of messages each day across hundreds of clusters to detect cybercrime and provide secure methods of sharing data and operations across corporations, organizations, law enforcement, national security and insurers.

Charles regularly speaks on research at conferences including DEFCON, Secure360 and GrrCON. Charles began his career in cybersecurity analytics in 2002 while in the US Navy serving as the Network Security Officer for the Naval Postgraduate School. After leaving active duty in 2005, he ran a consulting company that focused on data and operations sharing across private and public sector organizations. In 2012, Charles joined network behavioral and anomaly company, Lancope designing and deploying advanced network security solutions. In 2015, Charles joined Cisco Systems through the Lancope acquisition and supported the Global Security Sales Organization until launching WitFoo in 2016.

When Charles is not researching challenges in big-data and cybersecurity, he enjoys SCUBA diving, travel and long dinners with his wife, Mai.

Matt Topper is a security professional with a passion for captivating audiences. With almost two decades of experience in technology, Matt has thrived in roles ranging from development to CTO. Today, he focuses on information security, compliance, and security program management at MSPs.

As ConnectWise's Security Evangelist, Matt's mission is to educate and inspire. Armed with a Computer Science degree and CISSP, CISM, and CCSP certifications, he draws from his expertise across Internal IT, MSP, and vendor roles to provide unique insights. Outside of tech, Matt finds balance in running and family time.

Matt Lee has dedicated the last 10 years to raising the security tide in the SMB market. His efforts have served in every capacity in a growing MSP that grew to support 20,000 endpoints. His leadership around technology direction and security/compliance protected and elevated over 17,000 people in Small to midsize businesses in five states. He has since taken on a new role as a force multiplier under Brad Fugitt as the Senior director of Security and Compliance at Pax8. He is driving the external thought leadership to empower MSPs to continue to grow in their security knowledge and operability. He lives to ensure his children maintain the same quality of life we do around technology, which is imperiled daily by threat actors.

I am originally from Washington, Illinois were I attended Washington Community High School graduating in 2010. I immediately began my professional career in the U.S. Navy operating and maintaining nuclear reactors and later training new operators. My time spent in this highly challenging technical environment provided me the foundation I rely on to this day. While on active duty, I lived in South Carolina, New York, and Hawaii.

My post Navy career began at Kitware in Clifton Park, NY. Kitware maintains a number of open source software solutions to include CMake one of the most popular build solutions for C++ today. My time there was spent developing policies and strategies for security initiatives as well as building out security processes. While there, I developed a program that integrated with the company's endpoint management, vulnerability management, and HR/Payroll system to deliver tailored vulnerability reports to end users. My contributions led to Kitware being awarded the James S. Cogswell Outstanding Industrial Security Achievement Award by the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency.

After Kitware, I began working at Mercury, a FinTech company providing a banking platform to startups and eCommerce companies. I am part of a small InfoSec team building out the security program to include training, endpoint security, infrastructure security, development of policies and procedures, and implementation of detection and response capabilities.

I hold a B.S. in Nuclear Energy Engineering Technology from Thomas Edison State University and I am set to graduate with an M.S. in Cybersecurity with a concentration in Computer Security from DePaul University in June 2023.

Certifications Held: CISSP, Sec+, PenTest+, and CySA+.

I am an Information Security Analyst for RLI Insurance Company based out of Home Office here in Peoria, Illinois. I work on the Security Operation team there where we are responsible for handling incidents as they arise, performing Threat Hunting, phishing analysis, alert triage, and wearing many other Security "Hats". Outside of work, I enjoy working on analyzing malware (as a hobby), playing Dungeons & Dragons and Warhammer 40,000 with friends, and building computers.

Ben Padgitt is a graduate assistant for the Center for Cybersecurity at Bradley University and instructor for the networking class. He participated in the 2021 and 2022 engagements. As a former undergraduate student in the Management Information Systems – Cybersecurity program at Bradley, Ben now assists with the red team’s infrastructure and provides other support to the team. He is a founding member of the new Cybersecurity Club which provides students with the opportunity to improve their hacking skills. His interests are in cryptography, infrastructure, and the security of computer systems.