Ralph Echemendia

Co-Founder, TicketAnimal

Ralph Echemendia is a world-renowned Instructor, Ethical Hacker and Security Expert, who has appeared on KTLA, CNN, FOX News and Animal Planet, as well as in the pages of USA Today and Forbes magazine to name a few. He has been involved in the research and development of internationally recognized course-ware and certifications as well as several key security technologies currently powering some of the most powerful e-commerce sites on the Internet. He has also developed a two-day Applied Hacking and Social Engineering curriculum with Kevin Mitnick, he collaborates on many different areas of information security with other well known industry professionals and is currently a freelance technical editor for Pearson Education and Cisco Press. For over 16 years, he has conducted secure infrastructure deployments, security audits and penetration tests, managed numerous technology teams and budgets as well as consulted for multiple organizations around the world, including the United Nations, Oracle and various hospitals and financial institutions. Over the last 8 years he has written and delivered training on Hacking and other information security topics to the US Marines Corp., NASA, Army, Navy, SPAWAR, Bristol Meyer Squibb, Google, AMEX, Boeing, Intel, Microsoft, Symantec and IBM to name a few. Recently Mr. Echemendia has been applying his knowledge in the entertainment and sports industry with Ticket Animal as well as providing services to Parameter Security as a senior consultant and was involved with the inception of The Hacker academy. Prior to that he acted as Information Security Product Line Manager for Intense School/Vigilar where he authored the official EC-Council ECSA certification materials and acted as Lead Instructor and Information Security Consultant and researcher on a number of projects, prior to this Ralph founded and was CEO of ReDvolution Technologies, LLC., a security consulting and education provider based in South Florida with clients throughout the US and Latin America. Ralph was also a principal partner and Director of Security and professional services for Coral Reef Techknowledge. During the dot.com era he held the position of Director of Web Operations for Yupi Internet (now MSN Latin America) and was responsible for managing a staff of 15 specialists as well as creating and implementing systems to report risk, availability, downtime, response time and network health. He also designed a layered secure architecture, which in conjunction with existing load balancing / high availability systems resulted in increased security while not degrading performance. Prior to joining YupiMSN, Ralph was the Chief Information Officer for StarTravel.com, where he engineered, managed and implemented a secure high availability (HA) data communications infrastructure at Internet co-location facilities located in Miami, FL and San Diego, CA. In addition, he gathered information, researched and performed exhaustive assessments on a number of transit and access providers around the world to complete the design of a network optimized for US and Latin American connectivity. Mr. Echemendia was also responsible for network and systems implementation at Oracle Latin America and served as the Operations Engineer/Senior Systems Administrator for VisualCom, Inc. Where he was responsible for the complex system development, technical life cycle and management of the United Nations Missions Secure Web project. He was once also a Security Specialist and Systems Programmer for McKessonHBOC. Mr. Echemendia is a member of the ISSA, he holds EC Council’s Certified Ethical Hacker, Certified Security Analyst certifications and also the OSSTMM Professional Security Tester certification by the Institute for Security and Open Methodologies.