Dade has a degree in Business / Computer Information Systems, and then another degree in computer science (sorta) with a minor in economics. Throughout college, dade worked in web development and worked with Intel on automating testing of wireless cards. dade interned at Intel’s solid state drive division (NSG (NVM (Non-volatile memory) Solutions Group)) for a year before finishing college and eventually returning to Intel’s NSG to work in Quality & Reliability for Intel Optane devices for two years.

“But dade, I thought you were a hacker?”

It was during dade’s time working at Intel that he made the transition into a security role. He volunteered on Intel’s red team and quickly became a very active participant in red team work. Within a year, dade was hired for a full time role on Intel’s red team. During this time, he did a lot of reconnaissance work and he wrote a lot of documentation. He also got his OSCP, through a rather simple human-augmented loop of searchsploit -> metasploit -> root -> repeat. A bit over a year later, his time with Intel came to an end.

He then went on to work in another red team role at Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) for a couple years. During his tenure at OCI, he worked on numerous engagements, demonstrated badge cloning techniques to executives, further developed reconnaissance tooling, and helped to architect and develop an in-house custom malware and C2 platform.

Current Employment

In 2021, dade left OCI to join a startup, where he currently works as a Staff Security Engineer. His responsibilities and tasks in this role have been numerous over the years:

  • Employee lifecycle management
  • Google Workspace administration
  • Okta administration
  • Design and roll-out of hardware-based MFA and device trust programs to the entire company
  • Managing pentest remediation
  • Conducting red team exercises
  • Handling incident response
  • Performing anti-fraud and anti-abuse research and development
  • Overhauling CI/CD, Build systems, docker optimizations, etc
  • Helping to overhaul and improve our observability stack
  • Leading the company towards embracing a pattern of frequent dependency updates and highly repeatable builds.
  • Managing our application security scanning
  • Developing security features for the product
  • Developing a culture around building internal tools to ease employee workloads.
  • Co-organizing company CTF events, writing dozens of CTF challenges oriented towards developers and first-time CTF players.

Extra-Curricular Projects

During his red team years, dade worked a lot on a project called natlas, which provides a (hopefully) user-friendly way to do continuous scanning of network ranges and search all of the data. Gone are the days of cron jobs that run nmap and then complicated grep statements that look for the content you want.

dade has been involved in numerous extra-curricular activities, including:

  • ACM Student Chapter President for 2 years
    • Organized two regional ACM style programming competitions
    • Organized a trip to a local-ish security conference for interested students
    • Organized a student outreach project for building computer skills
  • /r/blackhat moderator for 8ish years
  • /r/darknetdiaries new moderator
  • Guest appearance on Darknet Diaries #35
  • Occasionally captures some flags with b0tchsec
  • Revived the Sacramento hacker scene with defcon916
  • Wrote some CTF challenges for BSides PDX 2020, 2019, 2018
  • Content Creator and one-time host for Whose Slide Is It Anyway
  • CCDC At-Large Red Team for a year
  • Coached an AFA CyberPatriot team of high school and middle school students for two years, leading them to the national finals the second year.

Wrapping up

If any recruiters are reading this, dade has 15 years of blockchain experience, 31 years of kubernetes experience, and 400 years of machine learning experience. On top of this, dade has been awarded the nobel peace prize for his work on sharing good vibes. If that wasn’t enough, dade was also awarded the ACM Turing award for his research into proving P = NP via a complicated series of image macros.

If you’d like to get in touch with dade, please join this conference call and wait for him to arrive.