Building a Cyber Range to Hack Like a Pro! – Kevin Cardwell

Kevin Cardwell served as the leader of a 5 person DoD Red Team that achieved a 100% success rate at compromising systems and networks for six straight years. He has conducted over 500 security assessments across the globe. His expertise is in finding weaknesses and determining ways clients can mitigate or limit the impact of these weaknesses.

He spent 22 years in the U.S. Navy. He has worked as both software and systems engineer on a variety of Department of Defense projects and early on was chosen as a member of the project to bring Internet access to ships at sea. Following this highly successful project he was selected to head the team that built a Network Operations and Security Center (NOSC) that provided services to the commands ashore and ships at sea in the Norwegian Sea and Atlantic Ocean . He served as the Leading Chief of Information Security at the NOC for six years. While there he created a Strategy and Training plan for the development of an expert team that took personnel with little or no experience and built them into expert team members for manning of the NOSC.

He currently works as a free-lance consultant and provides consulting services for companies throughout the world, and as an advisor to numerous government entities within the US, Middle East, Africa, Asia and the UK . He is an Instructor, Technical Editor and Author for Computer Forensics, and Hacking courses. He is the author of the Center for Advanced Security and Training (CAST) Advanced Network Defense and Advanced Penetration Testing courses. He is technical editor of the Learning Tree Course Penetration Testing Techniques and Computer Forensics. He has presented at the Blackhat USA, Hacker Halted, ISSA and TakeDownCon conferences as well as many others. He has chaired the Cybercrime and Cyberdefense Summit in Oman and was Executive Chairman of the Oil and Gas Cyberdefense Summit. He is author of Building Virtual Pentesting Labs for Advanced Penetration Testing, Advanced Penetration Testing for Highly Secured Environments 2nd Edition and Backtrack: Testing Wireless Network Security. He holds a BS in Computer Science from National University in California and a MS in Software Engineering from the Southern Methodist University (SMU) in Texas. He developed the Strategy and Training Development Plan for the first Government CERT in the country of Oman that recently was rated as the top CERT for the Middle East. He serves as a professional training consultant to the Oman Information Technology Authority, and developed the team to man the first Commercial Security Operations Center in the country of Oman. He has worked extensively with banks and financial institutions throughout the Middle East, Europe and the UK in the planning of a robust and secure architecture and implementing requirements to meet compliance. He currently provides consultancy to Commercial companies, governments, federal agencies, major banks and financial institutions throughout the globe. Some of his recent consulting projects include the Muscat Securities Market (MSM), Petroleum Development Oman and the Central Bank of Oman. He designed and implemented the custom security baseline for the existing Oman Airport Management Company (OAMC) airports and the two new airports opening in 2017. He created custom security baselines for all of the Microsoft Operating Systems, Cisco devices as well as applications. Additionally, he provides training and consultancy to the Oman CERT and the SOC team in monitoring and incident identification of intrusions and incidents within the Gulf region. He holds the CEH, ECSA, LPT and a number of other certifications.