penetration-testing
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Min Pyo Hong Learned to Break Software. Then He Built a Company Around Finding the Cracks First.
The SEWORKS founder turned childhood curiosity, competitive hacking and one successful exit into a durable idea: software gets safer when its defenders learn to think like attackers.
Brandon Veiseh Is Building Security That Doesn’t Wait for the Audit
After years turning security research into products, Brandon Veiseh is betting that the next useful security teammate will be an agent that tests continuously, proves what it finds, and hands engineers a fix.
Rene Brandel Wants Software to Hire Its Own Hacker
A decade after winning a hackathon with a bot that built websites by conversation, the former AWS product leader is giving software an equally tireless adversary.
The Hacker Who Put the Annual Pentest on a Permanent Shift
Casey Cammilleri spent years being paid to break into companies. Then he found the more stubborn vulnerability: an industry still treating security like an annual appointment.
Eric Smith Built a Career by Asking Security to Prove It
For nearly three decades, the Lares co-founder has treated cybersecurity as a claim that must survive contact with reality. His work helped give penetration testers a shared playbook - and executives a more useful question than “Are we compliant?”
Mariano Nunez
Mariano Nunez is the CEO and co-founder of Onapsis, the Boston-based company that pioneered security for the business-critical ERP applications - SAP, Oracle and others - that run the world's largest enterprises. A security researcher turned operator, he was among the first to publicly demonstrate cyberattacks against SAP systems and built the first open-source ERP penetration testing framework. Under his leadership, Onapsis Research Labs has discovered and helped patch more than 1,000 zero-day vulnerabilities, and the company partners directly with SAP as an endorsed application security solution. Nunez has been named EY Entrepreneur of the Year, an MIT Top 35 Innovator Under 35, and a Boston Business Journal 40 Under 40.
Nathan Sportsman
Nathan Sportsman is the founder and CEO of Praetorian, an Austin-based offensive cybersecurity firm he started in 2010 and bootstrapped for a decade before taking a Series A led by McKinsey in 2020. Beyond running the company, he hosts and produces 'Where Warlocks Stay Up Late,' a long-form interview series documenting the hackers who built the field. He is a contributing author to 'Hacking Exposed,' a U.S. patent holder, and a former adjunct professor at UT Austin.
Santiago Rosenblatt
Santiago Rosenblatt broke into PayPal and NBA League Pass at age six, found a marketplace glitch at fourteen that let him buy electronics for the price of shipping, then turned that curiosity into a career defending banks and fintechs. Today he is Founder and CEO of Strike, an AI-led continuous pentesting platform that compresses vulnerability detection from months to hours, protects 120+ companies across 20+ countries, and raised a $13.5M Series A to expand across the U.S. and Brazil.
Neschae Fernando
Neschae Fernando is the CEO of Zone24x7, a 22-year-old technology engineering company headquartered in San Jose, California, with a major hub in Sri Lanka. With a dual background in electrical engineering (MS and BS from UCLA) and enterprise IT delivery at Cisco, Fernando leads a 270-person team that sits at a rare intersection: companies capable of integrating hardware and software end-to-end. Under his leadership since June 2022, Zone24x7 has won seven industry awards in 2025 alone, including Gold at NBQSA and the IoT Technology of the Year Award, while expanding its AI, RFID, and cognitive vision platforms across 50+ enterprise clients globally.
Vinnie Liu
Vinnie Liu is the co-founder and CEO of Bishop Fox, the largest private professional services firm focused on offensive security testing. Starting his career as an NSA analyst at age 17, Liu co-founded Bishop Fox in 2005 with Francis Brown, bootstrapping it for 13 years out of an Arizona living room before raising $175M in venture funding. Today, Bishop Fox serves 26% of Fortune 100 companies and 8 of the 10 largest global tech firms, combining elite human testers with its proprietary Cosmos platform for continuous attack surface management and AI-augmented penetration testing.