Hack the Pentagon Project

Monzy Merza, chief security evangelist and director of cyber research at Splunk on the Hack the Pentagon project, which invites experts to hack into Pentagon systems to test its security defenses.

[su_note note_color=”#ffffcc” text_color=”#00000″]Monzy Merza, Chief security Evangelist and Director of CyberResearch at Splunk:

“The DoD already has mature red teams and offensive cyber capabilities. Bug bounty programs are fairly common in the technology industry. This DoD program will strengthen DoD deployments, exercise blue team capabilities, and shine a light on those who build the DoD’s Internet presence. Bug bounty programs typically pay for performance, thus this is a good precedent to reduce the contracting friction in doing business with the DoD. Anyone can participate and the DoD only pays if vulnerabilities are discovered. As the bug bounty program becomes more successful, the DOD will enhance its IT environments to include greater degrees of visibility and automation. Like most organizations, the DoD is challenged with human resource shortages for cyber defenders and this program may also serve as a recruiting tool.”[/su_note]

[su_box title=”About Monzy Merza” style=”noise” box_color=”#336588″]Monzy Merza serves as the Chief Security Evangelist and Director of Cyber Research at Splunk. He has more than 15 years of tactical and cyber security research experience in government and commercial organizations. His experience includes vulnerability management, security product testing, penetration testing, adversary modeling, cyber tools and infrastructure development. Merza has served as content developer and instructor for cyber trainings and red/blue team exercises. He has also been an invited speaker at government and open conferences. Merza’s current research is focused on integrated approaches to human driven and automated responses to targeted cyber attacks.[/su_box]