Getting Into Cybersecurity w/ John Stoner

Join us on Thursday, December 17, 2020, at 11:30 AM EST as John Stoner discusses ways to help you focus down your efforts into something more manageable; tailoring your studying for particular jobs and building a lab.

John Stoner (@1MrStoner) discusses cybersecurity as a career and how broad the field is, narrowing down your studying and preparation based on work responsibilities. The talk will discuss the fact that nobody in cybersecurity knows everything and that, broadly speaking, most experts specialize reasonably early on due to the expansive nature of cybersecurity.

We’ll discuss building a solid foundation based on basic networking and security principles, among other topics. We’ll also highlight some great resources (such as Professor Messer and other free resources). The talk also discusses different types of methods to learn the basics and how people learn differently, with quite a bit of time emphasizing two critical skills for cybersecurity: Initiative and Curiosity.

John E. Stoner is a cyber threat intelligence analyst with CACI working in the Analytic Group (AG) at the DoD Cyber Crime Center (DC3). John has over 20 years of experience in the national security and intelligence sector. Previously to this role, he was a federal civilian serving as the Deputy Director of the DCISE Directorate at DC3. Mr. Stoner previously worked as a Cyber Counterintelligence Analyst and Lead Technologist at Booz Allen Hamilton (BAH) and worked with various clients and internal BAH cross-functional teams. Before that, he was a Cyber CNO Instructor for Berico Technologies, working with US Army clients at Fort Meade, Md. Previous to that, he was at BAH as a Lead Instructor for cyber and intelligence work also with a US Army client at Fort Meade.

Mr. Stoner served for over ten years in the US Army (Active Duty) as a Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) analyst, stationed in Wiesbaden, Germany; Fort Meade, Md; and Ottawa, Canada; with one deployment to Bagram, Afghanistan. He was honorably discharged as a Staff Sergeant (E-6) in 2010. His experience includes information technology, instruction and course design, cyber exercise and testing, penetration testing, threat support, SIGINT, and cyber operations. He is a frequent speaker and attendee at various BSides cybersecurity conferences. He is a huge soccer fan and coaches youth soccer, having recently gained his US Soccer D coaches certification. He resides in Jessup, MD, with his partner Rebecca and daughter Elleanna.