Andrew Crotty

AI can find bugs, but it also generates enough garbage reports to overwhelm the people who are supposed to be fixing them.

Later in the show, I'm gonna talk with Andrew Crotty of the Ginger Hacker Initiative about something we don't spend nearly enough time on, how people actually get into this industry in the first place.

This is Initial Access.

I'm Sean McMillan, community manager here at Bishop Fox, and joining me this week are Sergio Villegas, senior managing analyst, and Dylan Sparks, senior operator.

Um, all right.

Well, we, we often spend a lot of time on this show talking about people like Dylan and Sergio and, uh, and the fine folks at, at Google who are very good at breaking things.

But there's another question that we wanted to spend a little time on, how do you become one of these people? And, uh, at Black Hat this year, I had the pleasure of meeting Andrew Crotty, better known as The Ginger Hacker, for reasons that will become apparent, uh, in just a moment.

Uh, he runs The Ginger Hacker Initiative, a nonprofit built around helping students, veterans, career changers, and other newcomers find their way into cybersecurity through training, scholarships, mentorship, and community.

For those who don't know who you are, do you mind just taking a quick couple minutes here and introducing you and what you do?

yeah hey everybody my name is andrew crotty also known as ginger hacker and long story short is i help folks break into cyber security so just over a year ago i had the decision to make a non-profit called the ginger hacker initiative where what we do is we help provide scholarships throughout the year to help folks get into cyber security so i did the hard work i made a 501c3 non-profit started reaching out to all the certification vendors because let's just face it they all keep getting a little bit more expensive every year And with some awesome partnerships, I now get to either get in-kind training or discounted training that I provide back to the community.

Now, for my big boy job, I work in cyber as a senior threat intelligence analyst with the federal government.

And yeah, but the passion is really about giving back, doing some mentorships and then having fun conversations like this with Dakota.