William L. Leighton

William has been a consummate professional in the I.T. space for 25 years.  Having raised his skills from intern, to system administration on to Cyber lead on a government contract.

His Cyber defense skills were founded in education and on the job agile skill adoptions.  When he sees processes that can be improved, he sets out to streamline efforts so focus can be improved for the federal customers.  One such effort was automating ForcePoint installations, which took 4-5 days.  With automations scripting and PowerPoint, the installations were shortened to ~8 hours.

He is proud to have had his previous environment go through a collaborative penetration test.  Through that effort the backend systems were unable to be breaches.  It opened his skills to adopting a DevSecOps preview.

He is looking for his next role.  ISSO is the goal to help align a program with proper RMF alignment and ATO compliance.

As an intern at Harley-Davidson, William was able to save ~$70,000 in licensing by auditing licenses applied to what wAs in current use.  As Applications Systems Administrator at Harley Davidson he was primarily assigned to support IBM InfoSphere Information Server, on the ERP team.  He also supported middleware apps from SAP like Business Objects R/3 and BI.  The primary effort from this engagement, was correcting an error on InformationServer between Christmas Eve 2011 and working 36 hours straight with IBM to fix an error, then IBM rushing the next version to be released on Boxing day.  Then William installed the fresh application between 12/26 through 1/1/2012, so the EDW business can be up and running 1/2/2012.

With GDIT, he was able to excel, presenting to customers ways to remediate the most problematic vulnerabilities and how various tools in the security stack work together.  He presented to around 150 people at regional conferences and 80 at the customer's national training center in San Antonio, Tx.  He also saw how ForcePoint could be enhanced for quicker installations via scripting, and moved that effort forward.  Working with the ISSO on the last contract is what drove William to want to move into an ISSO position next.

At Penn State, during his Master's degree, William earned his post baccalaureate certificate in Cyber Security, and attended the “Three Miles Island @ 35” conference where he met several of the key players handling that first US nuclear accident.it was a very interesting conference.  It also enhanced studies in Homeland Security with a focus in information security and forensics.