A “curious defender” at heart, Greg Bailey loves puzzles and has an insatiable desire to know how things work. “I take things apart, I learn how they operate. I break things so I know how to fix them. That's just how my brain works,” he says. But it was a chance opportunity that initially brought him into the information security field.

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While in college studying radio communications, the world wide web took off and due to Greg’s experience with computers he was immediately hired by a consulting firm in his hometown of Chicago upon graduation. “It was there I witnessed our firm and others get hit by some of the more famous viruses at the time: ILOVEYOU, AnnaK, Code Red, SQLSlammer, Blaster, etc.,” he says. “That first time I experienced running around our office pulling LAN cables with my IT buddy, I was hooked. I had to know how these programs had gotten into our network and how they operated.”

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Since then, he’s spent more than 20 years in the IT field, working for large financial institutions including Discover, HSBC, and SunGard; professional services organizations such as Accenture, Fishnet/Optiv, and HP; and as the acting CISO at mobile game company Zynga. Through these roles, Greg has built years of experience running security operations and performing penetration testing and adversary emulation.