Speaker Spotlight: Tony Perez

Tony Perez is one of three co-founders at Sucuri, Inc. Sucuri is a globally recognized organization committed to making the interwebs safer, one website at a time. Tony functions as the Chief Operating Officer at Sucuri, managing the growing staff of 30+ employees, 20,000 + clients and over 200,000 unique domains, performing over 2,000,000 unique website malware scans a month. He is very passionate about website security awareness and education, with a special passion for intrusion forensics and attacker psychology. Tony is a former Marine Corps veteran with two combat tours in Iraq, and holds an undergraduate degree in Technology Management and spends most of his spare time on the mats refining his Jiu Jitsu technique.

Tony is presenting: WordPress Security – The Latest and Greatest Around Website Security

1) Why do you like using WordPress?
Likemost people, WordPress has made itself attractive through it’s extensibility and usability. It has been its ease of use that has made me a fan and why I use it on most of my personal properties.

2) Why did you decide to speak at WordCamp Ottawa?
The idea to speak in Ottawa was an opportunity to engage in a new community beyond the virtual boundaries of the Continental United States. The idea of getting in front of a new group of people and engaging with the local community was a nice change of pace.

3) What is the one thing you want people to walk away with from your talk?
Ideally those that attend will gain a better appreciation for Website Security. Technology has made it such that anyone can create a website with a few clicks. That’s great, right!!! With it though comes a responsibility that most end-users don’t give much thought to, I want to change that and bring awareness in the hopes that we can fend off future attacks and compromises through education.

4) What is your favourite WordPress plugin or theme? Why?
I really don’t have favorites unfortunately, mostly because I don’t use many. I do however enjoy the Genesis framework.