As BSidesPDX has evolved over the years into a larger event, the process of curating the content has evolved as well. In an effort to recognize that the goal of BSidesPDX is to support the local information security community, we’ve recruited a set of local experts to help with the selection process.

Topher Timzen

Topher Timzen is a Principal Offensive Security Engineer on the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Red Team. Topher has spoken at conferences such as DEF CON, SecTor, BSidesPDX, and CanSecWest on offensive security research and red teaming. Most recently he, alongside Michael Leibowitz, open sourced tooling to allow Red Teams to deploy automated infrastructure for adversarial emulation. Enjoying teaching, particularly about exploitation, he has been running the CTF at BSidesPDX for the past few years. Topher is located in the woods hiking or mountain biking when not computing. More information can be found at TopherTimzen.com & @TTimzen.

Michael Leibowitz

Michael Leibowitz (@r00tkillah) has done hard-time in real-time. An old-school computer engineer by education, he spends his days hacking the mothership for a fortune 100 company. Previously, he developed and tested embedded hardware and software, fooled around with strap-on boot roms, mobile apps, officesuites, and written some secure software. On nights and weekends he hacks on electronics, writes CFPs, and contributes to the NSA Playset.

Maggie Jauregui

Maggie Jauregui is a Security Researcher for the Platform Armoring and Resiliency team at Intel Corporation. Maggie focuses on firmware security. She has presented her research at conferences such as DEF CON, CanSecWest, DerbyCon, Grace Hopper, BSidesPDX, and UEFI Plugfest.

Jesse Michael

Jesse Michael is an experienced security researcher focused on vulnerability detection and mitigation who has worked at all layers of modern computing environments from exploiting worldwide corporate network infrastructure down to hunting vulnerabilities inside processors at the hardware design level. His primary areas of expertise include reverse engineering embedded firmware and exploit development. He has presented at DEF CON, Black Hat, PacSec, Hackito Ergo Sum, Ekoparty, and BSides Portland. He has also taught classes on firmware security at RECon Montreal and Ringzer0.

Kees Cook

Kees Cook (@kees_cook) has been working with Free Software since 1994, and has been a Debian Developer since 2007. He is currently employed as a Linux kernel security engineer by Google, working on Android and Chrome OS. From 2006 through 2011 he worked for Canonical as the Ubuntu Security Team's Tech Lead, and remains on the Ubuntu Technical Board. Before that, he worked as the lead sysadmin at OSDL, before it was the Linux Foundation. He has written various utilities including GOPchop and Sendpage, and contributes randomly to other projects including fun chunks of code in OpenSSH, Inkscape, Wine, MPlayer, and Wireshark. He's been spending most of his time lately focused on security features in the Linux Kernel.

Wu-chang Feng

Wu-chang Feng is a professor of Computer Science at Portland State University where he works on building capture-the-flag games and codelabs for teaching students a range of topics including web application exploitation, cloud security, blockchain vulnerabilities, reverse engineering, fuzzing, and symbolic execution. He also participates in security education outreach via high-school camps and internships such as CyberPDX and Saturday Academy.