About
About
Hi, I’m Willa! The rest of this page will be strangely in 3rd person, so I apologize in advance. I’m a hacker, maker, and amateur bird photographer based out of Chicago, Illinois. I live on the Northside of the city with my wife, two amazing kids, and two rambunctious kitties. I love tinkering with technology, and making things do shiny new things they were never meant to do. I’ve been involved with the infosec community since my first DEF CON back in 2009 when I sent myself on vacation to the desert to find a way out from behind the desk so I could fix some very awful code.
Career
Willa is currently Sr. Staff Product Manager for the Tester Experience at Cobalt, bringing over 20 years of professional, hands-on experience across the application development, information security, and communications domains. Willa is experienced with the entire software development lifecycle from several viewpoints due to prior work as systems engineer, software engineer, security engineer and customer for several software, technical documentation, and communications projects.
Willa was a member of the Lockheed Martin CIS Red Team before joining Veracode as a penetration tester. She led a team of security consultants at Veracode providing penetration testing services to customers across a wide portfolio including healthcare, automotive, banking, and logistics companies.
At GuidePoint Security, Willa used her prior experience in both software development and application security as Practice Director of Application Security - Tactical Services leading the $6 million business that enabled customers to build secure, reliable software solutions.
After her time in consulting, Willa took on the role of Associate Director of Penetration Testing at Humana leading the penetration testing, bug bounty, and security controls assessment efforts across the enterprise.
Presentations & Volunteer Work
Willa has presented at DEF CON, BSides Orlando, Florida Cyber Alliance’s CyberCamp and several Central Florida information security groups such as OWASP Orlando, DC407, HackUCF, and OrlandoDevs. She has also served on the Call for Papers review board of Diana Initiative, BSides Orlando, BSides Chicago, BSides 312, and Blue Team Con. In prior years Willa also organized the local DEF CON group DC407, lead the Orlando TOOOL chapter, co-organized OWASP Orlando, and was president of her local hackerspace FamiLAB.
Since moving to Chicago in 2023, she has become the point of contact and organizer for DEF CON Group Chicago and can be found hanging around the Burbsec Discord.
