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Dan is currently the Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) for Allegiant Travel Company, responsible for Information Security, Cybersecurity Operations, and the Privacy, Risk Governance, and Compliance teams. He is a seasoned Information Security, Cybersecurity, Risk Management, and Technology professional, that was worked across every facet of Information Security, Cybersecurity, and IT throughout his 25+ year career. Dan has worked all over the United States and Internationally, helping design some of the most robust and complex information security systems and network architectures in the world. He has owned his own business, worked with small teams and startups from ground zero through exit, as well as worked in leadership positions for Fortune 100 companies across several verticals, leading large teams comprising several thousand team members.
He has a Bachelor of Science degree in Cybersecurity & Information Assurance, and a master's degree in business administration -Technology Management. In addition to his extensive education and experience Dan also has his CISSP, CCSP, and SSCP from ISC2, as well as a plethora of other industry certifications dealing with encryption, forensics, cybersecurity, and cloud technologies.
Prior to taking on the role at Allegiant, Dan has held positions as the Head of Infrastructure Security for Meta (formerly known as Facebook), where he was responsible for maturing the Infrastructure Security program at Meta, as well as having held various roles as both an individual contributor and leader at the highest levels spanning his 25+ year career. He has matured security programs having built them from the ground up (0 -> 1), as well as experienced leading large multi-faceted programs.
The bulk of Dan's career has been spent building, supporting, and leading highly technical teams in Information Security and Cloud Computing (virtualization prior to cloud computing). This includes extensive work in both high throughput and high-performance supercomputing (yes there is a difference) environments. Dan has had the joy of working with quality organization such as TransUnion, Wells Fargo, NASA, Goodrich, DoD, DoJ, DEA, Customs, University of Wisconsin - Madison, Morgridge Institute, Kohl's, and many other organizations. He also developed the concept of digital minefields for the DoD. Dan is a key contributor and holds several patents for inventive security processes and applications he designed. Dan has performed countless penetration tests, audits (NIST, PCI, SOX, CoBIT, NERC, DITSCAP, ISO), threat models, security assessments and vulnerability scans, spanning every major hardware and software platform most people can think of.
Dan has been featured in Information Security Magazine, and also enjoys giving presentations, sitting on discussion panels, and mentoring the next generation of Information & Cybersecurity professionals and is involved with several major conferences, and has given presentations at Cloud Security Alliance, RSA, Defcon, Blackhat, InfoSec World and other conferences. He also is an active member of several mentoring communities for those wishing to advance their InfoSec career.
While Dan is a modern CISO, meaning that he is first and foremost a business leader. He has extensive experience working with and reporting to board of directors. At the present time Dan reports to the CEO of Allegiant directly, the Executive Risk Committee Monthly, and at every quarterly board meeting. He is also the chair of the Artificial Intelligence Governance, Security, Ethics & Compliance subcommittee, the chairperson of the Cybersecurity committee for the American Value Airlines trade association and is a member of several advisory committees within the cybersecurity industry.
In addition to his business and leadership skills the technical hands-on aspects of information Security and technology will always be Dan's passion. He keeps his own technical skills honed to a razors edge. This is evident that even outside of work Dan has got a 42U server rack running multiple different OS distributions running on a small (96 core) ProxMox and Kubernetes clusters, personal instances of both Azure and AWS Cloud, as well as several virtual reality headsets and other advanced technologies that he is using to continuously keep his skills up to date on the rapidly changing technological world we live in.
Lastly Dan is an avid reader, plays soccer, loves the outdoors, volunteers in his community and teaches robotics to high school students as part of the US FIRST Robotics program.
Career Highlights:
Leading, growing, and maturing the Information Security, Cybersecurity, and R&C teams at Allegiant has been a great career topper for me. It's such an amazing organization for its size, doing amazing things with technology, and impacting lives in a positive way every day getting people to/from vacation destinations and their loved ones.
Helping build and mature the Infrastructure Security at Meta (formerly Facebook), this is an infrastructure comprised of more than 8 million servers, an average network egress measured in TB/s and pumping out more than 28,000 GB/s of data across nearly 3 billion users.
Helping mature Paradigm's cybersecurity program, and guiding Paradigm's information security program through SOC2 compliance and the due diligence and security requirements around Paradigm's acquisition by Builder's FirstSource for $450M.
Serving as a Global Director, Information Security for TransUnion, leading an Information Security program with multiple teams distributed across the 38 countries, and was responsible for the network ingress and egress security controls both on-premises and in the cloud for TransUnion.
Building the Information Security Operations, Engineering, and Architecture program at the Morgridge Institute for Research, and being able to scale up a compute cluster for DHS that scans more than 275 million lines of code a day looking for vulnerabilities.
Owning and selling his own successful business (Digital Minefield Inc.), as well as worked cybersecurity and information security projects within the financial, educational, healthcare, and governmental verticals.
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