VetSecCon '25

Mick Baccio is a globally recognized security strategist with a career spanning offensive operations, threat intelligence, and national-level incident response. He currently advises organizations around the world through his role at Splunk, helping security leaders improve operations through data-informed approaches. Mick was the first Chief Information Security Officer for a U.S. presidential campaign (2020), and previously served in the Obama White House as the Chief of the Threat Intelligence Branch. Mick’s work blends deep technical knowledge with a strong belief in team culture and institutional learning—bringing a unique perspective to the intersection of human and machine decision-making in security operations.

In his spare time, Mick teaches lockpicking and is a THRUNT Corp founder and serves as Chairman of the Board.

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Andy Piazza, Senior Director of Threat Intelligence, Palo Alto Networks Unit 42

Andy Piazza is an accomplished security professional with 20 years of experience in security operations, threat intelligence, and incident response. He is currently a Senior Director of Threat Intelligence at Palo Alto Networks Unit 42, where he leads strategic research teams focused on nation state actors, cybercriminal activity, and malware analysis. Prior to Unit 42, Andy was theGlobal Head of Threat Intelligence at IBM X-Force where he led a team of fifty threat researchers and led a go-to-market effort to commercialize threat intelligence services.

Andy is passionate about leading and developing threat intelligence teams and is a frequent contributor to the cyber threat intelligence (CTI) community through his personal blog and talks at industry conferences including ShmooCon 2024, SANS CTI Summit 2024, and RSAC 2022.

He has worked alongside clients and stakeholders in multiple critical infrastructure sectors to improve their incident response capabilities, security operations integrations and processes, and threat management programs.

Andy is a US Army combat veteran with multiple deployments to Iraq, Central America, and Haiti. He has earned a Master’s in Intelligence Studies from American Military University and a Master’s in Information Security Engineering from SANS. He enjoys writing, mentoring, and project development in support of threat intelligence and cybersecurity operations. He’s also committed to serving the broader cybersecurity community as Operations Lead for the Northern Virginia-based cybersecurity conference BSidesNOVA and a Def Con Contests Goon. Andy can be found on Twitter as @klrgrz, on Medium at https://klrgrz.medium.com, and his personal site klrgrz.com