Biography

Randy Marchany is the University Information Security Officer for Virginia Tech. He is also the director of the VA Tech IT Security Lab, a component of the university's Information Technology Security Office. He is the author of VA Tech's Acceptable Use Statement. He is a co-author of the SANS Institute's "Responding to Distributed Denial of Service Attacks" document that was prepared at the request of the White House in response to the DDOS attacks of 2000. He was a co-author of the SANS Institute's "Incident Handling Step-by-Step" that was one of the early guides for building an incident response program.  He has been a member of the SANS Institute's faculty since 1992 and is one of the Institute's original instructors. He is a co-author of the EDUCAUSE "Computer and Network Security in Higher Education" booklet. He was a member of the EDUCAUSE security task force focusing on risk assessment and security metrics and the Higher Education Information Security Council (HEISC). He is member of the Virginia Cyber Range executive committee. Randy is a former member of the REN-ISAC (Research, Education, Networking Information Sharing and Analysis Center) board.0

Randy is one of the founding members of the US Cyber Challenge (USCC). The USCC mission is to significantly reduce the shortage in the cyber workforce by serving as the premier program to identify, attract, recruit and place the next generation of cybersecurity professionals. He also designs the curriculum for these summer camps.

He was a member of the Center for Internet Security (CIS) development team that produced and tested the original CIS Unix and Windows 2000/XP security benchmarks and scoring tools. He is a member of the CIS working group that created version 8 of the CIS Security Controls.

He is one of the founders of the Virginia Alliance for Secure Computing and Networking (www.vascan.org), a consortium of security practitioners and researchers from VA Tech, U of Virginia, James Madison Univ., George Mason Univ. He has been a frequent speaker at national and international conferences such as Educause, SANS, IIA, ISACA, ACUA, International CISO symposium, IEEE, NIST, NY State OIT Security conference, FBI-Infraguard chapters, RSA. He's been the subject of articles in the Chronicle of Higher Education on security issues at university campuses.

Randy received a 2021 SANS Difference Maker award. He was a recipient of the 2016 Shirley C. Payne IT Security Advancement award, the 2000 SANS Institute's Security Technology Leadership Award, the 2003 VA Governor's Technology Silver Award, a member of the team that won the EDUCAUSE Excellence in Information Technology Solutions Award in 2005 and a member of the Virginia Cyber Range team that won the 2017 Virginia Governor’s Technology Award for innovative use of technology in education. He is a co-holder of three cybersecurity patents. He is acknowledged as one of the North American masters of the hammer dulcimer. He is the author of the original theme song of National Public Radio's nationally syndicated radio program, "World Cafe". His band, "No Strings Attached" was nominated for or won "Indie" awards (independent record label's version of the Grammy) for Best Album (String Music) category in 1984, 1985, 1986, 1988, 1990. Blog: http://randymarchany.blogspot.com Twitter: @randymarchany