System and Network Hardening

Manuel Leos Rivas earned a bachelor’s degree in Business Administration and Computer Systems Engineering at the Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo Leon in Mexico and a Master of Science in Information Security Engineering with focus on Incident Response at the SANS Technology Institute. He holds over 50 cybersecurity-related certifications from GIAC, CompTIA, isc2, and AWS, among others.

Manuel has worked in cybersecurity for over 20 years in four different countries. He started his career in IT/Information security in 2000 as Network and Firewall Administrator in Mexico. Later in 2007, he switched to information security as Security Analyst and compliance coordinator.

In 2011, he started working for Gemalto (now Thales DIS). Gemalto relocated Manuel to France as Solution Security Expert and a few years later to Canada to work as Cloud Security Engineer for Gemalto. At Gemalto, Manuel managed ModSecurity Web Applications Firewalls protecting over a thousand websites and applications. He implemented hardening and multiple SIEMs in highly secured environments for large multinational companies in diverse sectors like banking and mobile network operators.

Since 2016, Manuel has committed part of his time to improving the OWASP ModSecurity Core Rule Set as one of the OWASP CRS developers and contributed numerous improvements to the project.

AWS Canada hired Manuel in 2019 as Cloud Security Architect to provide professional services to Public Sector companies, including government, education, health, insurance, and power utilities.

In 2021 Manuel relocated to the United States of America to work for Backblaze as Cloud Security Architect.