The Real Power of Penetration Testing Unveiled

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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 2^nd 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 2016. 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. 

About me

THE ENTREPRENEURIAL SPIRIT

Since I was 15, I have been involved in starting, building, expanding, or growing entrepreneurial ventures. Some ventures began in my backyard; others in someone's basement or apartment; and still others within a huge national or global enterprise. In all cases, what has driven me is taking an idea (or problem) and helping spawn that into a reality.

Whether the venture created is in business, science, the arts, education, or any other humane field of endeavor, invention and discovery drives me. I am also very committed to contribute to my family, friends, colleagues, community, and world.

I have been in so many different ventures in my life that my mother wondered out loud when I was 'going to get a job.' But my job has always been creating jobs. That is the work of an entrepreneur. In the early 1990s, I began my career in technology investment banking, advising software and hardware companies on business and financing strategies, and raising funds for those businesses. At that same time, I took a strong interest in publishing. As we all know, both information publishing companies and technology companies in the 1990s saw their World crash together head on. Each learned they could not survive or thrive if they were not strong in their command of both technology and information.

Not every venture I have been involved in succeeded. Anyone who tell you have a perfect business track record is simply lying. But the failures inform how you do the next one better ..., assuming you are willing to learn and grow by the mistakes you make.

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ENTRY INTO THE BUSINESS OF EDUCATION

In 2002, I landed in the education arena when we rescued and then resuscitated a globally well-regarded live, in person training and publishing company that had jumped into e-learning in the late 1990s, way before anyone even knew how that might work online. I ran that business for about 16 years and travelled the World to manage training initiatives for many of the largest global financial institutions, and many 100s of 1000s of individual students (over 10x the number of students I now have on Udemy).

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THE BACKDROP | A PASSION FOR LEARNING | PERSISTENCE

As a child, I struggled to read and felt a great deal of embarrassment and frustration because of that. But I refused to let that prevent me from learning. I kept many hundreds of English language words with definitions and their usages on file cards, and daily reviewed and read their meanings and usage. I felt embarrassed, humbled and (rather) angry that I had difficulty learning. But I PERSISTED AND WOULD NOT GIVE UP.

By high school was enrolled in many advanced placement classes, and then was fortunate to end up at an Ivy League school (the University of Pennsylvania) where I majored in Economics and had dual minors in Mathematics and English. I also participated in courses in the UPenn's venerated Benjamin Franklin Scholars program, which was intended to be limited to the most intellectually gifted kids at school (which I was certainly not). So, how did I get to take courses in this program? I demonstrated that I wanted to learn everything and would not compromise on the normal boundaries. I also showed up and would not take no for an answer. I SIMPLY

PERSISTED AND WOULD NOT GIVE UP.

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MY TAKEAWAY AND ADVICE FOR YOU

If you want to build your dreams, you can but you must persist. You must set your eye on an ambition and never give up. You must learn to pivot and change as circumstances change, of course, and you must always learn and learn to learn.

My mission is to help you learn and to help you achieve your dreams. Feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn if I can support your ambitions in any way.

Stay healthy. Stay happy. Keep growing. Always be learning.

~ Paul