Profile
Manuel Leos Rivas completed his bachelor’s degree in Business Administration and Computer Systems Engineering at the Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo Leon in Mexico. He also completed his Master of Sciences in Information Security Engineering with a focus on Incident Response and two post-baccalaureate certificates in Cybersecurity and Cloud security at the SANS Technology Institute. He holds over 60 cybersecurity and cloud certifications from CompTIA, GIAC, ISC2, and AWS, among others.
Manuel has worked in cybersecurity for over 20 years in four different countries in Europe and North America. He started his IT/Information security career in 2000 as a Network and Firewall Administrator in Mexico. Later, in 2007, he switched to information security as a Security Analyst and compliance coordinator for ACS a Xerox company. In 2011, he joined Gemalto (now Thales DIS) as Solution Security Officer, where he was promptly promoted to Solution Security Expert and relocated to France. In his pursuit to improve his Cloud Security skills, Manuel emigrated to Canada in 2018, to work as a Cloud Security Engineer for Thales DIS. In 2019, Manuel started working as a Cloud Security Architect for AWS Professional Services Canada. Manuel has been working as Backblaze’s Cloud Security Architect since 2021.
Manuel has worked implementing hardening, SIEM, security monitoring, WAFs, and automation in highly secured environments. Manuel has experience working for large multinational companies in diverse sectors like banking, mobile network operators, cloud service providers, and government. Since 2016, Manuel committed part of his time to support the OWASP ModSecurity Core Rule Set as one of the OWASP CRS developers. Manuel authored the Web Server Protection for the InfoSec Institute in 2019.
Manuel has been a Subject Matter Expert (SME) for CompTIA since March 2017, he joined the CompTIA SME Technical Advisory Committee (CSTAC) in November 2020 and the CompTIA Governance Committee in November 2023.