Mary Ellen Kennel

…is a current contributor to the DFIR Definitive Compendium Project as of 2017 and is employed as Vice President, Incident Response in the Financial Industry. Prior to her current work, Mary Ellen (@icanhaspii) was a Senior Cyber Threat Analyst at First Data and before that a Senior Consultant with AccessData’s Incident Response and Digital Forensics Professional Services Division. Mary Ellen has over 10 years of experience in the field and has performed numerous investigations for Fortune 500 companies regarding possible hacking, breach, ip-theft, and data compromise. Her tasks and responsibilities include analysis of the evidence for case relevance, documentation of case findings, malware analysis, and executive summary report writing. Mary Ellen has been published and featured in “Hakin9” Magazine, and has been awarded “Super Honorable Mention” from the annual SANS Holiday Hack Challenge. Mary Ellen is adept at relaying technical terms to non-technical people and has presented to the United States Secret Service and the United States Postal Inspectors. Mary Ellen was a contributing author for SANS Institute’s SEC565 “Data Leak Prevention” course and has held the role of SANS Advisory Board Member. She is a graduate of NYU’s IT Security program with a GPA of 4.0; courses including but not limited to: Advanced IT Security, Fast Track CISSP, Firewalls/Packet Analysis, and Network Intrusion Detection: Hacking Understood. Lastly, Mary Ellen is a Mennonite from Lancaster County and author of the Manhattan Mennonite Blog, and she once won an award for building a computer from scratch in 10 minutes and 38 seconds.