Ryan Kovar
Distinguished Security Strategist and leader of SURGe
Ryan joined Splunk in 2014 and currently serves as a distinguished security strategist and leader of SURGe, Splunk’s “Blue-collar for the Blue team” security research arm. With over 20 years of experience as a security analyst, threat hunter, defender and Unix plumber, Ryan loves traveling the world and researching the biggest problems for Splunk’s customers. Prior to joining Splunk, he worked at organizations like DARPA, US Navy, UK Home Office, and a variety of public/private companies, always in a security practitioner or leader role. Ryan has an MSc in Cyber Security from the University of Westminster, more certifications than he remembers, and has an abject hatred of printers.
Tamara Chacon
Security Strategist, SURGe
Tamara was born and raised in Colorado Springs, CO. She graduated from the University of Northern Colorado in Criminal Justice and Anthropology. She is a security strategist on the Splunk SURGe team and is currently based out of Virginia. When she is not working, she loves to play with her wild boxers, golf and cook.
Mick fell in love with the idea of cyberspace around nine years old after reading Neuromancer. Before joining Splunk, he was the Chief Information Security Officer at Pete for America, holding the honor of being the first CISO in the history of presidential campaigns, and was also the White House Threat Intelligence Branch Chief in both the Obama and Trump administrations. When not posting pictures of food, cats or Air Jordans to social media, Mick is a Goon at DefCon, and teaches lockpicking.
Marcus LaFerrera
Senior Manager, SURGe
Marcus has been in the security field longer than he'd like to admit. Most of his experience before joining Splunk as a security strategist has been supporting various government agencies. He has done everything from leading SOCs, to building threat hunting teams, to research and development. As an avid open source enthusiast, he has contributed to several projects as well as the lead maintainer on many more. When not modifying his .vimrc or .tmux.conf files, he enjoys family time, hiking, mentoring and craft beer.
Shannon Davis
Global Staff Security Strategist, SURGe
Shannon hails from Melbourne, Australia. Originally from Seattle, Washington, he has worked in a number of roles: a video game tester at Nintendo (Yoshi's Island broke his spirit), a hardware tester at Microsoft (handhelds have come a long way since then), a Windows NT admin for an early security startup and one of the first Internet broadcast companies, along with security roles for companies including Juniper and Cisco. Shannon enjoys getting outdoors for hikes and traveling.
Audra Streetman
Security Strategist, SURGe
Before arriving at Splunk, Audra worked as a reporter, producer and news anchor at local TV stations in Indiana, California, Kentucky and Colorado. As a journalist, she covered several major cybersecurity stories including SolarWinds and ransomware attacks targeting Colonial Pipeline, JBS and Kaseya. In her free time, she enjoys hiking and skiing in the Colorado Rockies.
Johan Bjerke
Principal Security Strategist
Johan works for SURGe and is based in Stockholm, Sweden. He is a researcher and contributor to Splunk’s security Rapid Response events, is the lead developer for Splunk Security Essentials — the most popular app on Splunkbase — and is an active contributor to the global Splunk and security communities. Johan is also chairing the Splunk Security SME community group in EMEA.
Kelcie Bourne
Security Strategist, SURGe
Kelcie currently calls Melbourne, Australia, home. Her passion for cybersecurity really began with a childhood dream of one day becoming a spy, but her journey professionally began originally as an SE in the commercial patch in Australia. Here, she dealt mostly with customers building out their security posture and developing security maturity. Prior to this, Kelcie has a background across different domains in data science. As part of SURGe, Kelcie supports their security research efforts across APAC and globally. Music, climbing, running and always discovering new hobbies play a large part in her personal life outside of work.
David Bianco
Staff Security Strategist
David has been involved in information security for more than 20 years, working with Fortune 500 companies, Wall Street firms, public utilities and major universities on incident detection and response. He credits his early focus on network security with honing his skills in extracting the most information possible from just the network data, before moving ahead to other areas.
Ryan Fetterman
Technical Staff Security Strategist
Ryan joined the SURGe team after a decade spent in windowless basements conducting government research and consulting. Ryan holds doctorate and masters degrees from George Washington University, and a cybersecurity undergraduate degree from Penn State University. He sometimes holds controversial opinions, like “you don’t need machine learning for that.”