The Important People

Colin Ahern was appointed by Governor Kathy Hochul in June 2022 as the first Chief Cyber Officer of New York State. In this role, he leads cross-agency efforts to protect New York State from cyber threats and led the development of the state’s first ever cybersecurity strategy. Before joining the state, he helped to stand up and lead New York City’s cyber defense agency and worked in cybersecurity in the financial services industry. He enlisted in the Army reserves after 9/11 and later served on two active duty deployments to Afghanistan as an Army officer. He ended his Army career as a company commander in the Army Cyber Brigade. He has taught at the Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs and the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies. He lives with his wife and 2 children in Brooklyn.

Winnona DeSombre Bernsen is an MPP/JD Candidate at Harvard Kennedy School and Georgetown Law, and a non-resident fellow at the Atlantic Council. She was formerly an RE / security engineer at Google’s Threat Analysis Group, tracking targeted threats against Google users, and is the founder of offensive security conference DistrictCon, held in Washington DC. In recent years, Winnona has organized policy content at DEF CON and authored multiple pieces on offensive cyber capability proliferation.

J. Gdanski is the Founder and CEO of Evertas, where he has led Evertas’s technical development and underwriting, as well as secured multiple rounds of funding from top investors; he is a security, privacy, and risk expert. J. is also a founder of CryptoISAC.

Prior to launching Evertas, he was a leader in the enterprise blockchain space and was one of the first to work on institutional custody for crypto. In this capacity he served as an early, significant contributor to blockchain consortia including R3 and Enterprise Ethereum Alliance, of which he was a founding member. He was an integral part of the first enterprise blockchain RFP and has worked on numerous blockchain-based systems. He was the first dedicated hire in the space for a bulge bracket bank and the world’s largest custodian bank and has presented to regulators, legislators, politicians, and business executives, including from Fortune 50 companies.

Mark Griffin is a veteran security researcher specializing in code analysis, fuzzing, and tooling to augment expert workflows. He has built and released several Binary Ninja plugins and writes about the intersection of security, software, and visualization on his blog. He now focuses on helping people understand code faster and more intuitively through the work at his company Undaunted Development.

Caleb Gross is an offensive security engineer at Aurora Innovation where he secures autonomous vehicles. As prior Director of Capability Development at Bishop Fox, he led a team of offensive security professionals specializing in attack surface research and vulnerability intelligence. Caleb also served as an exploitation operator in the US Department of Defense’s most elite computer network exploitation (CNE) unit.

Jennifer Hay is a national security leader with deep expertise at the intersection of technology, policy, and defense. Most recently, she served as Director of the Defense Digital Service (DDS), where she led a cross-functional team of engineers, product managers, and designers delivering rapid software solutions across the Department of Defense.

Previously, Jennifer led Global Government Relations at DataRobot, an enterprise AI platform, where she shaped policy on responsible AI and supported deployments for the Department of Defense, Intelligence Community, and public good organizations.

Over her two-decade career, Jennifer has held key roles at the Department of Defense and the White House, including positions at the National Security Council, the Deputy Secretary of Defense’s office, the Office of the Under Secretary for Intelligence & Security, and the Defense Intelligence Agency.

She holds an M.A. in International Affairs from The George Washington University and a B.A. in Political Science from Pepperdine University. She lives in Arlington, MA, with her husband, son, dog, and cat.

Omar is a Staff Security Engineer focusing on building secure and reliable systems, stopping fraudsters, and in general enabling people to do their best work safely and securely. Aside from hacking, Omar enjoys drinking iced coffee year round, collecting pointy toe boots, and tending to his plants with his lovely assistant, Dumpling.

Tom Ritter works for Mozilla and does security things. That includes anti-exploitation, the bug bounty program, security advisories, 0-day response, static analysis, and as of recently – web layer privacy stuff. He’s also a Tor Browser developer and maintains much of their code present in Firefox. He previously did consulting for iSEC Partners and NCC Group, and founded their Cryptography Services practice.

Guanxing Wen is a security researcher with over a decade of experience uncovering critical vulnerabilities in low-level systems, spanning TrustZone, kernels, IoT, and infotainment. A two-time top winner in the Huawei Bug Bounty (2021 & 2022), he has presented at Black Hat, MOSEC, INFILTRATE, and 44CON. He currently works at CertiK, where he explores the messy edges where low-level systems meet blockchain infrastructure — most recently, DePIN.

Thomas is a red teamer and penetration tester at Bishop Fox, originally with a background in mobile and cloud security, and always with a tendency to dig deep into weird edge cases. Whether it’s bending MDMs, abusing OAuth flows, or standing up cursed infrastructure just to tear it down again, he’s most at home when things aren’t working as intended. Outside of hacking, he makes glitchy pop music, which probably explains his love for beautiful chaos.