Ben was born in Darwin, Australia and has lived and worked up-and-down the East Coast of Australia. He started his career in Sydney, at Australias largest telecommunication company, learning how to manage servers and services at a massive scale. As ’the tallest poppy’, these servers also garnered frequent malicious attention… Ben was able to spend several years defending, monitoring and responding to a range of systema and security incidents from a range of adversaries, including nation-state threat actors.

Following this, Ben made the move to a Federal Governmment agency in Canberra and continued to defend national critical systems from motivated and well resourced threat actors. Observing the tactics and technologies employed, he honed his skills to identify and prioritise hardening, monitoring and remedial activities.

Enticed by the agile nature of startups, Ben made the move to Melbourne to work with one of Australias largest tech startups, before working with a US based tech unicorn. In these roles, Ben was able to apply his vast knowledge of the adversary, and deploy defenses using new methods utilising cloud and container technologies.

Since then, Ben has worked to defend overseas largest banks, by educating and supplmenting junior security teams and ubilding new capabilities to enhance their security posture.

When he is not saving the cyber-world, Ben enjoyes travelling the real-world (armed with a camera and cutlery) and watching a range of sports (from Formula 1 to Australian Football).