Tuesday, October 6th, 2026

Location: ECPI University, 
5555 Greenwich Rd – Suite 360, Virginia Beach, VA 23462

 

 

Speaker Bio: With 20 years of hands-on IT experience, Matthew has built a career spanning cyber threat intelligence, ethical hacking, penetration testing, and security research. He spent 14 years working in Cyber Threat Intelligence within the U.S. military before transitioning into offensive security, where he has spent the past five years as an ethical hacker and penetration tester.

He holds multiple certifications from CompTIA, EC-Council, and GIAC/SANS Institute and remains actively involved in vulnerability research, with more than 20 accredited CVEs. His current work focuses on closing the gap between understanding threat actor behavior and turning threat intelligence into practical, operational security outcomes.

Talk Description: What began as a conventional honeypot deployment has evolved into something with genuinely differentiated collection capability, driven by one insight: a honeypot is only as valuable as it is indistinguishable from a real host. We discovered early that all six of our OpenCanary nodes shared a single SSH HASSH fingerprint matching no real machine on the internet — find one, find all six. We rebuilt each sensor with a coherent, individually-generated identity: distinct cryptographic fingerprints, service banners, web skins, and business personas, several backed by real domains and forward-confirmed reverse DNS.

 

After-Social:

As soon as the meeting is over, we will take all our chatting over to Plaza Degollado Mexican Grill. It is down the street from ECPI on the corner of Newtown Road. Let’s have some fun together.

Schedule:

5:30 PM – 6:00 PM Meet, Greet and Network

6:00 PM – 6:15 PM Introduction and upcoming events discussion

6:15 PM – 7:15 PM Speakers Presentation and Q&A

7:15 PM – 7:45 PM ISSA-HR Business Meeting (Meeting ends)

7:45 PM – Unofficial social @ Plaza Degollado Mexican Grill

Registration:

Eventbrite: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/2001634688235