Rick Mellendick currently holds a Department of Defense (DoD) Top Secret (TS) clearance and is currently the Chief Security Officer for Signals Defense in Owings Mills, MD with 18 years of information technology security experience. Mr. Mellendick performs the duties of technical director and chief strategist to multiple DoD, federal, intelligence, and private organizations. He provides direct support to the U.S. Critical Infrastructure. His background is in designing secure networks in multi-platform/multi-classification environments. In 2004 Mr. Mellendick was the tactics lead for the US Joint Forces Component Command-Network Warfare (JFCC-NW) group performing deep research on the Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) and the intrusions into the DoD and civilian agencies. The knowledge gained from researching the advanced threats to critical infrastructure, as well as civilian, and federal agencies are the basis for the Signals Defense Computer Network Defense Team and Red Teams tactics to protect our clients’ systems. Mr. Mellendick has extensive experience in computer network operations including developing proof of concept attacks and performing demonstrations for many federal and corporate clients. The teams that Mr. Mellendick leads regularly perform Red Team analysis specializing in wireless and RF attack and defense as well as technical surveillance counter-measure (TSCM) sweeps. He is a subject matter expert for computer network operations, wireless offensive tactics, and designing information systems to comply with federal and local regulations. Mr. Mellendick has personally completed over 200 wireless and wired penetration tests. Mr. Mellendick was the chief security architect for a congressionally recognized center of excellence for a multi-billion dollar hosted service data center built using non-traditional defense in depth strategies. His teams utilize offensive network techniques to better defend the network and critical infrastructures. Mr. Mellendick’s certifications include CISSP, ISSEP, OPSA, CEH, IEM, IAM, MCP, Certified DoD System Administrator, and Linux Security certifications.