Cybersecurity has enormous implications for economic development in Nevada, including industries such as banking, healthcare, data centers, and online gaming, all of which are increasingly important components of Nevada's economy. Cybersecurity also has important implications for our power grid as well as for the large and growing military presence in Nevada.

The Cybersecurity Center brings together expertise from a range of disciplines including political science, information systems, journalism, criminal justice, philosophy, psychology, history, and computer science and engineering.

Preparing the next generation of cybersecurity experts requires education and career development experiences in highly multidisciplinary research settings that are integrated with a curriculum that transcends the structures of the standard academic curriculum. The Center not only provides cutting-edge applied research on cybersecurity but will also provide educational resources for the state. The Center currently  participates in two undergraduate minors and a cross-disciplinary graduate certificate in cybersecurity. The students from these programs can contribute substantially to our workforce, and their availability will make Nevada a much more attractive destination for a broad range of industries.

Advisory board members

Greg Brower, Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck

With more than 20 years of experience both as a first-chair litigator and in public service, Greg Brower's practice focuses on civil and criminal litigation, as well as regulatory and enforcement actions (including FCPA matters), corporate investigations, cybersecurity matters and federal and state government relations.

Most recently, Greg served as the assistant director for the Office of Congressional Affairs at the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), serving as the FBI’s chief liaison to Congress on a wide range of critical oversight and investigative matters. He previously served as the FBI’s Deputy General Counsel, managing a diverse portfolio of legal matters, including litigation, privacy, procurement, compliance and ethics. During his time as a senior FBI executive, spanning two administrations, he worked closely with high-ranking officials in the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), the U.S. intelligence community and with key leaders on Capitol Hill. Greg is a regular commentator and contributor on national security, legal and cybersecurity issues, regularly appearing on CNN and MSNBC, and he is the featured contributor on white collar crime and corporate compliance for the Washington Legal Foundation’s Legal Pulse blog.

Greg has a long history of public service.  At the federal level, he previously served as the U.S. Attorney for the District of Nevada, and as both General Counsel and Inspector General at the U.S. Government Publishing Office. Greg also served at DOJ as Legislative Counsel in the Executive Office for U.S. Attorneys. At the state level, he has served in a variety of public policy roles, including five terms in the Nevada Legislature, where he was chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. He has also served on the Nevada Gaming Policy Committee, the Nevada Advisory Commission on the Administration of Justice, the Nevada Sentencing Commission and the Nevada Juvenile Justice Commission.

Throughout his career, Greg has served the Nevada legal community as an adjunct professor of law at the William S. Boyd School of Law at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where he has taught courses in national security law and trial advocacy. Before attending law school, Greg served in the U.S. Navy as a Surface Warfare Officer.

Heather Hall, Employers

Heather Hall is a Department of Defense trained Cyber Security Professional aka Hacker with a Master of Cyber Security and Information Assurance. She also maintains 16 professional IT certifications, 14 of which focus on security. These certifications where earned while working as the Warrant Officer in charge of Computer Network Defense for the Nevada National Guard. Her background includes knowledge grown while holding roles that range from Computer Specialist, Database Administrator, System Administrator, Programmer, and Information Assurance Manager. Currently, Heather is the Information Security Program Manager for EMPLOYERS, a nation-wide workers compensation company. Her role has her managing third-party vendor risk reviews, vulnerability management, penetration testing, security awareness training, and data loss prevention. She also advises the business on security and manages incidents as they arise.

Allison Clift-Jennings, Filament

Allison is the CEO and co-founder of Filament. Her vision for bringing economic capability to connected physical machines used in business and industrial environments is the cornerstone of Filament’s technology solutions. Allison’s technical leadership and entrepreneurial mindset supported the creation of Filament’s Blocklet Chip™, the first secure hardware solution for the Internet of Things (IoT) blockchain technology space.

Mark J. Krueger, Chief Deputy Attorney General and Consumer Counsel, Bureau of Consumer Protection

Mark Krueger currently serves as a Chief Deputy Attorney General and Consumer Counsel in the Bureau of Consumer Protection, where his practice primarily focuses on complex antitrust, consumer protection, data privacy, and multi-state litigation. Prior to joining the Attorney General’s Office, Krueger was the Assistant District Attorney in Carson City and Lyon County respectively. Over the course of his career, Krueger has gained extensive experience in civil and criminal litigation and administrative law. Krueger has argued and practiced before the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, the Nevada Supreme Court, various District Courts, and numerous Justice and Municipal Courts. He has tried more than 40 criminal jury trials. Krueger has authored legislation, regulations, legal opinions, ordinances and municipal codes, and a chapter for an educational book regarding forensic interviewing of victims of child abuse. He holds a Juris Doctorate from California Western School of Law and a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

Shaun Rahmeyer, Nevada Office of Cyber Defense Coordination

Shaun Rahmeyer is the Administrator for the Nevada Office of Cyber Defense Coordination. In this capacity, Shaun is responsible for coordinating the protection of Nevada cyberinfrastructure, incident response and investigation, and strategic cybersecurity planning and management.

Antonio Rucci, InfoSec & Threat Intelligence Consulting

Antonio  A.  Rucci  is  a  retired  Counterintelligence  Special  Agent and  US  Army Warrant  Officer, with  more  than  35years  of  technical  security  experience.  Tony runs  a  private  Security  Consulting  Firm in  Knoxville,  TN performing  Penetration Testing, Passive Network Assessments and Incident Response Professional Services to both private government and commercial entities. Tony ran technical espionage and  computer  crimes investigations for  a  good  portion  of  his  operational  career.  He served as the Counterintelligence Operations Officer at The White House; serving two administrations from 1998-2004. He led the technical accreditation for the MultiProgram Research Facility (MRF) at Oak Ridge National Laboratory; then ran their Cyber Security Programs for the IC before being recruited to move to Reno, NV to build a data center for one of the beltway bandits. Since then, Tony has started three of his own companies; served as the Chief Security Officer for  two  others;  and  ran  Incident  Response  & Threat  Intelligence  for  two  others before stepping  back into Private Consulting. Tony continues to serve national security efforts with his CyberSecurity Consulting Firm in Knoxville and gets in the way a lot while his wife of 35 years, Pam, is taking care of their two amazing grandbabies! You can follow Tony on Twitter: @InsiderThreats

Todd G. Shipley, Vere Software

Todd Shipley served 25 years with the Reno (Nevada) Police Department, retiring as a Senior Detective Sergeant. His last position was managing the agency's Financial and Computer Crimes Unit. During this time, he was instrumental in the formation of the Nevada Advisory Board for Technological Crime as well as several state laws regarding fraud and cybercrime. In 2004 Mr. Shipley became the Director of Systems Security and High Tech Crime Prevention Training for SEARCH, The National Consortium for Justice Information and Statistics in Sacramento, California. He oversaw a nationwide program that provided expert technical assistance and cybercrime training to local, state, and federal justice agencies. In 2007, he started Vere Software and patented the processes in the software WebCase, the online evidence collection tool.

Todd is a Certified Forensics Computer Examiner (CFCE) and is a life member and Past President of the International High Technology Crime Investigation Association (HTCIA) 2010. He was recently re-elected as the HTCIA President for 2020 . He also retired after serving 31 years in the Nevada Air National Guard as Chief Master Sergeant. During his career he served multiple tours overseas and was awarded the USAF Combat Action medal during a tour in Afghanistan. Mr. Shipley is a regular speaker inter-nationally on Cybercrime issues and is an author . He was also featured as an expert on Internet investigations in the Alex Winter documentary "Deep Web".

Todd has been conducting, teaching and lecturing on Internet investigations since the late 1990’s. He participated with the U.S. Dept. of Justice as a planning panel member in the drafting of manuals/guidance to assist law enforcement investigation of technology crimes. He co-authored the book Investigating Internet Crimes: An Introduction to Solving Crimes in Cyberspace. Most recently he has been teaching internationally the investigation of Darknet crimes. I teach a two day hands on course to law enforcement investigators. He is a regular guest lecturer at the Canadian Police College’s Advanced OSINT course speaking on Darknet Investigations and participated in the 2018/19 Interpol Project Pandora which he helped design to train Interpol Middle East and North Africa region members on Darknet Investigations. During the course of the project he was instrumental in the development of specific training and unique materials related to law enforcement Darknet investigations.

Jason Truppi, Shift State Security (S3)

Jason is a veteran in the information security industry who continuously improves security capabilities within organizations by applying practical and scalable technology, operational guidance and best practices to companies of all sizes and industries. His two decades of experience include working on some of the largest national security and criminal cyber intrusion cases as a Cyber Special Agent for the FBI and developing threat detection capabilities at scale for Fortune 500 companies as a Director of Security at Tanium. In addition to founding ShiftState Security, Jason is an advisor to several software technology startups and continues to drive cyber policy as a Cybersecurity Fellow at the Center for Strategic & International Studies.

Joshua Watson, Reno Police Department

Detective Josh Watson has been a Reno Police Officer since 2002 and is currently the lead Detective and Forensic Examiner/Investigator at the Reno Police Department. For the past decade, his predominant focus has been digital forensics related to criminal investigations. He is the full-time examiner for the Reno PD Computer Crimes Unit and assists numerous other state and local agencies, and has completed over 1800 exams of digital devices over the past 10 years. He holds certifications for several forensic tools to include Cellebrite, FTK, Lantern, and Blacklight, and is trained and experienced in the use of Autopsy, EnCase, IEF, Axiom, Geotime and other forensic tools and methods. Detective Watson is a guest lecturer and instructor at the University of Nevada, Reno Computer Science & Engineering School and also presents regularly on cyber safety to local schools and youth organizations. He also works closely with the local FBI and USSS Task Forces, and has testified numerous times as an expert in County, State, and Federal Court.

Brian Wilcox, BlackRidge Technology

Brian Wilcox is a business professional serving both private and public-sector organizations since 1985. His career experiences range in organizational size from Fortune 5’s to startups, while holding a variety of positions spanning C-Level Executive to Individual Contributor. The first half of his career focused on medical devices, advanced manufacturing, historic preservation and community development. The second half of Brian’s career transition to security related Supply Chain, Information Security and consulting engagements. More recently Brian served in a public-sector capacity as a State of Nevada’s DMV Information Security Officer culminating as the State’s Chief Information Security Officer (CISO). Presently Brian has transitioned back to the private sector service as BlackRidge Technology International's CISO.

Steven Ramirez, Chief Information Security Officer, Renown Health

Steven Ramirez is the Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) for a major Nevada-based regional healthcare organization where he provides leadership and oversight in the strategic planning, execution, and assessment of the organization’s cybersecurity strategies, policies, procedures and guiding practices. Steven has extensive experience in healthcare information security, working in both the payer and provider workstreams, with organizations such as Catholic Health Initiatives (now CommonSpirit Health) UofL Health, IBM and McKesson. Steven holds two master’s degrees, his Master of Healthcare Administration (MHA) and Master of Science (MSc) in Safety, Security and Emergency Management. Steven is a Certified Information Systems Manager (CISM).  Steven is also part of the teaching team that supports the Harvard cybersecurity executive certification “Cybersecurity: Managing Risk in the Information Age”.