John grew up in Nitro, West Virginia, but is currently living in the Northern Virginia/DC area. Security has been his passion and his hobby for the past 14 years. He recently walked away from his job in IT management to pursue his career as a security researcher. This year he and a small team known as the XRG will be running the CTF here at hack3rcon. Lately, he has been spending his time reading, traveling, writing security tools, and studying reverse engineering and exploit development.