Clay Wells - From SysAdmin to Security Architect to Con Organizer!

Clay Wells has been living in kernel/userland since Red Hat 4.0 Colgate. Worklife has primarily been in academia and has included programming, system administration, and information security. He's a point of contact for the DC215 group and one of the Blue Team Village coordinators at DEF CON. He also created unofficial CTF challenges for local hacker cons and organizers for the first annual WOPR Summit this March 2019 in Atlantic City.

Clay, a security architect, musician, Defcon Blue Team Village Co-Organizer, and organizer of the first annual WOPR Summit, shares some really insightful tips on making it Information Security, as well as a fascinating recent war story.

WOPR Summit is March 1st, 2019, in Atlantic City!

Quotes:

• "My heart was racing... that was a huge rush, and that's when I was like yea... blue side F*** rocks!!"

• "Take a holistic approach to InfoSec, dive into the culture, different cons, music, people...volunteer, get out, get involved."

• "Learn a little about everything, then find what really interests you... and go for it!"

• "It's great to apt-get stuff... but try compiling a custom Linux kernel."

• "I'm a strong believer in embracing that creative side."

• "[Blue Team] certainly hasn't been the sexiest infosec job to have... yes, defense is what people want... there's a lot of defense work out there."

Links:

• Clay Wells on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ttheveii0x
• Clay Wells on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/clayball/
• Clay Wells Blog: http://www.cwells.org/
• WOPR Summit 2019: https://www.woprsummit.org/
• WOPR Summit Sponsorhip Prospectus: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5b81b8f745776e48dcfb884d/t/5ba666dbf4e1fc68321a7a27/1537631964367/wopr-summit-2019-sponsor-prospectus.pdf
• DEF CON Blue Team Village: https://blueteamvillage.org/
• Opensoc by Recon Infosec: https://opensoc.io/
• Recon Infosec: https://reconinfosec.com/
• BsidesDC: http://bsidesdc.org/
• Graylog: https://www.graylog.org/
• Kibana: https://www.elastic.co/products/kibana
• H.O.P.E Conference: https://hope.net/
• No Starch Press: https://nostarch.com/
• Outro Music by Clay: https://soundcloud.com/clayball/0x41-2-version-b

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