Topic: Who ya gonna call?
If there was something strange in your neighborhood, who ya gonna call? The answer is obviously, the Ghostbusters! Now if you looked outside your window, and noticed that your neighbor’s house had caught on fire, who ya gonna call? 911, and ask help from your local fire department! Let’s say you saw a bad car crash, and emergency services are needed urgently, who ya gonna call? 911 again, and ask for an ambulance or local EMT to be dispatched as quickly as possible! Now lets say that an elderly member of your community receives an email from someone that claims to be Microsoft, and demands that they send thousands of dollars in “licensing fees” to avoid criminal prosecution, who ya gonna call? That last one is where people suddenly don’t have a good answer. During a cyber emergency, most people don’t have the luxury of figuring out how to call for help on their own. We will discuss a number of strategies that cybersecurity professionals can use to help answer this last question, and hopefully stimulate good discussions on how we can better protect our communities from the growing cyber threat!
Speaker: Colin Hamill – Founder & IT Solutions Designer, Sentinel Forge Technologies
Colin has always had a deep fascination and passion for working with computers and using them to solve problems. This passion led Colin to study Computer Science at the University of Maryland, College Park, where he first met his now-wife, Melanie. It led him to a more than 15-year career as an Enterprise Presales Solutions Designer, where he would build solutions for his clients using different pieces of technology as “building blocks” to solve their technical problems. Regardless of the specific technologies included, Colin strove to communicate his solutions & designs in a clear & comprehensible way, free of the jargon and alphabet-soup acronyms that can make the IT industry inaccessible for most of the population. His passion drove him to continue his education, and he attended night classes at Loyola University after work and he earned his Master of Business Administration (MBA), with a focus on Information Systems. Colin’s MBA showed him how he could use his “technology building blocks” to solve his clients business problems & their technical problems at the same time.
Colin recently started his own business, Sentinel Forge Technologies, after seeing the impact on fuel supplies after the Colonial Pipeline Cyberattack of May 2021. Colin has focused his efforts on combating the ever-increasing threat of Ransomware and Cyberattacks on critical US infrastructure and to help train the next generation of Cyber 911s. He believes that protecting America’s food supply is of utmost importance and that securing it will mean protecting every link in the agriculture supply chain, both large & small.