Mario Ciccarelli

Prior to this role, Mario worked for a management consultancy, where his role involved continuously developing the cyber security strategy, helping clients reinforce their security posture and comply with a range of regulations to meet compliance constraints required by the business. He also designed security architectures and defined best practices and standards for secured networks, services, assets and tools.

Mario began his career as a system engineer with focus on cyber security, penetration testing and, systems and network hardening projects. After almost two decades of practice, he joined major payment services company in Italy as an Information Security Officer – CISO Deputy, where he became accountable and fully conversant with the Payment Card Industry certifications. In this role, he managed a team of security experts in charge of implementing security features and providing support in high-profile and escalated security incidents. He oversaw and assisted in performing ongoing security monitoring and continuous improvement of information systems, including risk assessment, gap analyses, new security capabilities assessments and recommendations. He conducted research and analysis of emerging and on-the-edge technologies and related cyber security implications; he also scouted and tested new cyber security offensive and defensive approaches and technologies. He oversaw regulatory compliance, established and implemented cyber security-related policies and established and oversaw the organization's security architecture.

In his previous roles, Mario has handled several notable projects, which include finding, reverse engineering and dismantling a previously unknown Apache rogue module, named p0sT5n1F3r. Mario shares his passion for reverse engineering and malware analysis within the information security community by attending and presenting in conferences and meetups. His published papers include: “Going Deep - A Guide to Reversing Smoke Loader Malware,” for SentinelOne and a report, p0sT5n1F3r - Reverse Engineering of a Breach, in 2019.

Mario is a telecommunications engineer from the University of Naples Federico II. He trained for the Advanced Exploit Development for Penetration Testers (SEC760) and holds the Global Information Assurance Certification (GIAC) Exploit Researcher and Advanced Penetration Tester (GXPN) certifications. Additionally, he is a Win32 Exploit Developer certified by Corelan, Mikrotik Certified Network Associate and Zabbix Certified Specialist. He is also an Offensive Security Certified Expert (OSCE), Offensive Security Certified Professional (OSCP) and Offensive Security Wireless Professional (OSWP).