Profile
Alyse Zavala soldered her first motherboard when she was 11 years old, and got a job working on the Geek Squad as an Advanced Repair Agent as an early teenager. She became extremely passionate about studying persistent malware techniques, and specialized in rootkit and bootkit removal for multiple Best Buy stores. She obtained a Bachelor's Degree in Biology with a focus in Genetics, while continuing her work in IT support until finally switching over to Cyber Defense in 2014 for Duke University. While at Duke, she obtained many offensive penetration testing certifications and loved testing out new defense evasion techniques. She helped test and build walk-throughs for Capture the Flag (CTF) competitions and volunteered to teach local college students how to learn hacking and build their skills. She fully switched to offensive security testing for her career in 2016, and was hired as a Senior Penetration Tester at Options Clearing Corporation in 2017. Now, Alyse runs the entire adversarial Red Team and oversees all DDOS and 3rd Party Penetration Test operations at OCC as Executive Director of Adversarial Penetration & Security Testing.