ROOTCON Blog

Christopher Elisan is a seasoned reverse engineer and malware researcher. He is currently the Principal Malware Scientist at RSA. He has a long history of digital threat and malware expertise, reversing, research and product development. He started his career at Trend Micro as one of the pioneers of TrendLabs. This is where he honed his skills in malware reversing. After Trend Micro, he built and established F-Secure's Asia R&D where he spearheaded multiple projects that include vulnerability discovery, web security, and mobile security. After F-Secure, he joined Damballa as their resident malware subject matter expert and reverse engineer. Aside from speaking at various conferences around the world, he frequently provides expert opinion about malware, botnets and advance persistent threats for leading industry and mainstream publications. Christopher Elisan is also a published author. He authored "Advanced Malware Analysis" and "Malware, Rootkits and Botnets." He co-authored "Hacking Exposed: Malware and Rootkits." All books are published by McGraw-Hill. 

Jason is the Director of Technical Operations at Bugcrowd. Jason trains and works with internal analysts to triage and validate hardcore vulnerabilities in mobile, web, and IoT applications/devices. He also works with Bugcrowd to improve the security industries relations with the researchers. Jason’s interests and areas of expertise include mobile penetration testing, black box web application auditing, network/infrastructural security assessments, cursory mainframe security analysis, cloud architecture reviews, wireless network assessment, binary reverse engineering, and static analysis. He is also a frequent player on the Shellphish CTF team. Jason lives in Santa Barbara with his wife and two children. 

Jose Ramon Palanco is currently CTO of Drainware, Inc., a security company with offices in U.S and Spain: Palo Alto (California) and Madrid. In the past he has worked at Deloitte CyberSOC, managing incidents response (Tier 3). He studied Telecommunications Engineering at the University of Alcala de Henares and Master of IT Governance at the University of Deusto. He has been speaker at OWASP, ROOTEDCON and MALCON. 

Lu Zhao got his Ph.D. in Computer Science with specialties in trusted computing, abstract interpretation, formal verification and program logic. He worked in designing and developing static analyzers for security at HP Fortify for three years, during which he gave talks about analyzing programs to find vulnerabilities in conferences and filed two patents in the security analysis area. He is now a principal application security engineer at NetSuite Inc. His primary job is building security features for NetSuite cloud services including securing data accesses, eliminating vulnerabilities, and preventing attacks. He also works on security reviews and automated security testing. He has a wide range of interests in computing, including security, programming languages, abstract interpretation, program analysis, formal verification, and automated constraint solving. 

Currently Markku Kero is the CEO of Eqela and Job and Esther Technologies. He also serves as Chief Software Architect for both companies. Over the last 15 years, Markku has been the driving force behind some of the most compelling technologies that have consistently been ahead of their time, overseeing the implementation of a 2G-compatible mobile voice over IP technology implementation, a mobile messaging system unifying email, SMS and instant messaging, a multi-device operating system and now automated programming language translation technology. He has founded and managed several companies in this field, previously Inceptions, Inc. and Kolipri Communications, currently Job and Esther Technologies and Eqela. 

Mon Nunez

Paul Prantilla got his masters in Computer Science from UPLB and currently is working on his PhD on Computer Security in UP Diliman. After a brief stint teaching graduate school, Paul became the first IT Director of UPLB, worked in the United Nations Population fund, and then in Chikka Philippines. While in Chikka, Paul worked with Mon Nunez to launch groundbreaking IT services in Smart - including Smart PowerApp and Internet for All. During this time, they became regular attendees of DEFCON and consistently attained a top 4 finish in multiple DEFCON contests. Currently, Paul works as the Director of Planning and Strategic Roadmapping in Globe's IT Division. 

Paul Sabanal is a Security Researcher on IBM Security's X-Force Advanced Research Team. He has more than a decade of experience in the Information Security industry, mainly focusing on reverse engineering and vulnerability research. He has previously presented at several conferences such as Blackhat and Hack In The Box, primarily on the topics of reverse engineering, sandbox vulnerabilities, and mobile security. His main research interests these days are in protection technologies, mobile malware, and IoT security. When not in front of a computer, he enjoys Disney movie nights with his daughter, playing weird instruments in a band, and pajama wrestling. 

Philippe Lin is a staff engineer in Trend Micro. He works in data analysis, machine learning, fast prototyping and threat research. He was a BIOS engineer in Open Computing Project. Active in open source communities, he is a hobbyist of Raspberry Pi / Arduino projects and the author of Moedict-Amis, an open source dictionary of an Austronesian language. 

Ray Torres is an IT Security enthusiast and practitioner. He likes to read daily updates of security-related topics and tries to maintain a white-hat mentality at all times when he sees a new CVE. *wink wink*. He graduated from the University of the Philippines Diliman and has a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science (he doesn’t like to brag but he graduated as Magna Cum Laude from the said university *wink*). Currently he is taking his postgraduate studies in the same university. He also goes to the gym 3 times a week and tries to maintain a healthy lifestyle. On his leisure time, he reads legal-thriller books by John Grisham or looks for open wifi access points (for free internet of course). 

Steve Miller is an incident response professional and the Security Strategist for FireEye in Asia-Pacific and Japan. Steve has over 10 years of experience in areas such as computer forensics, communications signals analysis and intelligence program management. 

Steve's background includes work for the U.S. Army, the National Security Agency, Cornell University, the U.S. Department of State, and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. 

As a part of FireEye's 24x7 incident response service, Steve leads security operations in APJ and also contributes to threat research and detection management. In his spare time, he rides a totally rad BMW F800GS motorcycle.