QV Career Talks - Cyber Experts

Marleese Attilakos
Commercial Leader and State Sales Manager, Cisco Systems Australia Pty Ltd

Marleese’s career spans over 20 years in the ICT industry, across sales, operations and channel leading Public Sector, Commercial and Enterprise sectors across IBM and Cisco.  During this time, Marleese built and sold a successful start-up in the transport industry. Students will have an opportunity to hear about the journey that led Marleese to a career in Cyber Security and what a typical day looks like.

Thomas Lezenhofer
Business Development Manager, Security Solutions Architect, Technology, Strategy Governance, Risk & Compliance, Security Management

Thomas’s work involves improving the security of customer businesses that span across diverse industries and with complex regulatory requirements. Students will have an opportunity to hear about the journey that led Thomas to a career in Cyber Security and what a typical day looks like.

Simon Finn
National Cybersecurity Advisor, Security and Trust Office

Simon has 24 years’ experience in the Information Security Industry. He is based in Sydney, Australia, and is a Cybersecurity expert working in Cisco’s Security and Trust Organisation (STO), whose mission is to ensure Cisco meets its security and privacy obligations to their customers, regulators, employees, and other stakeholders. Students will have an opportunity to hear about the journey that led Simon to a career in Cyber Security and what a typical day looks like.

Corien Vermaak
Cisco Cyber Security Architect

Corien is Cisco’s Cybersecurity Architect, APJC Centre of Excellence and the Global Co-lead Cisco Woman in Cyber. Corien started her career as a technology law specialist within the telecommunication space and soon fell in love with Data Privacy and the legal structures governing Cyber Crime. In her career, Corien specialised in Cybercrime legislation and Data privacy while representing large multinational on these matters. She has been involved in the writing of legislation in this regard as well as consulting to Africa Union and Interpol on issues relating to Cybercrimes and privacy.  

Matt Carling
Cisco ANZ Cyber Security Solutions Architect

Matt is an architect within Cisco’s Security and Trust Organisation (STO), with the core missions to: protect Cisco from cyber threat, protect Cisco products through Cisco’s Trustworthy Systems program, and help protect Cisco customers. Matt is focused on enabling a broad range of initiatives under these missions for ANZ including sharing Cisco’s own cyber security experiences and practices with customers. 

Peter Kydas
Product Security Engineer - Atlassian

Peter is currently working as a Product Security Engineer at Atlassian. He started his cyber security career with several years in penetration testing and really loves breaking company infrastructure. His hobbies include working on cars, hacking cars, and reading sci-fi books.

Avital Miskella
Application Security Specialist - Australia Post

Avital is an Application Security Specialist at AusPost. She has 4 years of experience in cyber security and penetration testing and has worked across a range of industries including banking, government and health. Along with Peter, she was part of RMIT's cyber security club RISC's leadership team while at university.

Max Munday
CyberCX Senior Security Consultant & Penetration Tester

Max is a penetration tester within CyberCX’s Security Assurance and Testing team. Max was a late comer to the industry, with a previous career in the Army before finding his passion for hacking and moving into cyber security. Max has hacked into critical national infrastructure, state government departments, telecommunication and utilities companies, and banks and universities. Max has run training workshops on internal network infrastructure compromise as well as discrete and secure communication methods for hostile environments.

KS Lam
CyberCX Principal Security Consultant & Penetration Tester

K.S is a penetration tester within CyberCX's Security Assurance and Testing team. K.S has led and performed numerous engagements/projects, including web application security assessments, red teaming exercises, thick/thin application assessments and network infrastructure assessments (both internal and external network) across numerous industry verticals: Banking & Capital Markets, Telecommunications, Travel & Tourism, Government & Public Service and Power & Utilities. K.S is also highly experienced in testing embedded devices such as ATMs, IoT devices, SCADA systems and speed cameras. As a technical lead in the team, K.S has conducted multiple full day internal training workshops including Software Defined Radio (SDR), Enterprise Wireless Network Assessment and Hardware Hacking.

Gijo Varghese
Head of Information Security and Cyber Resilience, Endeavour Energy

Gijo’s mission is to make the cyber world safe and secure by educating people and transforming businesses by developing high-value frameworks, strategies and intelligent security controls. Gijo has an MBA from Melbourne Business School, and industry recognised security certifications like CRISC, CISM and CISSP. In the last 22 years, he has delivered complex and transformational technology and cybersecurity programs with high performing teams in a range of industries across Europe, Australia and Asia.

Abhi Gupta
Atlassian - Platform Security Engineer

Abhi helps keep Atlassian’s digital infrastructure secure from the online nasties. He has a background in electronics engineering, biology, forensics and computer science. After being involved in the cyber security club of University of Melbourne (MISC), he started his career in offensive security as a penetration tester for banks and the government. He now focuses on securing the application and cloud platform of a large software engineering organisation.
Fun fact: he hates passwords - feel free to ask him why!

Alex Rosenzweig
Block/Afterpay – Security Engineer

Alex first got into cyber security by trying to hack/cheat at video games. He now puts his talents to good use as a Security Engineer at Afterpay. He has traversed many fields of IT, from technical support at his high school to cyber security in global companies. He is always learning and exploring new things, and loves sharing his knowledge and enthusiasm for all things offensive security and security automation with the world.

James Williams

Graphene Security - Director

James has worked in almost every domain of cyber and physical security over the past couple of decades, with experience in many different sectors and industries. Following a career that included becoming an infantryman in the Army Reserve, finishing two Arts degrees, doing risk assessments for national counter-terrorism policy, and leading the physical security team for the Melbourne office of a well-known international investment bank, James moved into cyber security consulting in 2017.

Since then, he has worked on a wide range of consulting engagements, with a strong preference for those of a more technical nature. In addition to delivering enterprise-level vulnerability management, identity projects, and security assessments for some of Australia’s largest organisations, James has worked in security operations, as a penetration testing manager, in threat assessment and threat intelligence, and as part of the occasional red team exercise.

James now runs his own cyber security consulting business, which is based on bringing the lessons learned from large and complex security projects to focus effort and investment on simpler, targeted solutions that provide maximum security benefit.

Jamie Simpson

Security Centric - Offensive Security Manager

Jamie is the Penetration Testing and Offensive Security manager at Security Centric, specialising in ethical hacking of web applications, mobile apps and corporate networks. During his 5 years as a penetration tester, Jamie has worked on over 200 engagements across a range of industries, including Banking, Government, Aviation, Medical and Insurance. In a nutshell, Jamie’s primary role as a “pentester” is to identify security holes, allowing him to break into clients' applications, software and infrastructure before the malicious hackers can. Some might say he gets to break stuff for a living.

After graduating high school in 2016, Jamie went on to do a Bachelor of IT majoring in Software Development at Macquarie University, where in his last semester he developed a love for Cyber Security and pivoted away from Software Engineering to pursue a career at EY as a penetration tester. During his time at EY, Jamie was heavily involved in the development and running of EY’s graduate penetration tester training program, teaching new joiners the ways of the hacker. In his capacity as Offensive Security Manager at Security Centric, Jamie is responsible for end-to-end delivery of bespoke penetration testing engagements spanning a range of disciplines, leading a high-performing team of specialist security testers to ensure their clients are in a safer, more secure position than when they started.