Product Team Spotlight: ‍Jon Marler

Jon Marler

Cybersecurity Evangelist and Product Manager

Jon Marler is VikingCloud’s Cybersecurity Evangelist and Product Manager based in Austin, TX – managing VikingCloud’s Web Risk Monitoring (WRM) solution.  Jon also provides ongoing research and technical expertise as part of VikingCloud’s solution innovation targeting complex attack scenarios and vulnerabilities.

Jon has worked in cybersecurity roles since 1998 and has been a Sales Engineer and Product Manager for VikingCloud since 2011. Before VikingCloud, Jon spent 9 years working with the world’s top acquirers to build online payment gateways and fraud prevention solutions. He holds the Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) certification and has volunteered with Debian since 1998 as a Debian GNU/Linux Package Maintainer.  Jon frequently publishes articles and has spoken at numerous online and in-person conferences, including the Electronic Transaction Association (ETA) TRANSACT and DefCon, for the past 4 years.

Jon’s passion for technology started when he was 9 years old when he wrote an Artificial Intelligence (AI)-enabled poker game in Microsoft Disk Operating System (MS-DOS) using Turbo Pascal. The game learned as players interacted, using a simple memory-based rule set.

Instead of studying though, Jon examined the Pascal source code to find and bypass the password. When his father later changed it and only provided a compiled game, Jon disassembled the application, found the new password, and bypassed it again. This curiosity, nurtured rather than punished, led Jon to a lifelong passion for cybersecurity and a successful career in the field.

Get to Know Jon Marler

Q: What gets you most excited/passionate about your job right now?

A: The work we do here at VikingCloud helps keep our clients’ businesses uninterrupted – but it also saves lives. This may sound overly dramatic, but when we deny criminals funding by interrupting cyberattacks, we impact their ability to fund violence, extortion, and other hidden crimes that often have terrible outcomes.

Q: What is the primary challenge prospective clients are experiencing when you first speak to them?

A: The biggest challenge is the knowledge gap in cybersecurity. There are so many rapidly changing facets of cybersecurity that it's impossible to keep up with unless you focus 100% of your time on it. The news media will hyper-focus on a single aspect, generating lots of interest, but without any context around what these attacks mean for organizations and individuals. Our clients are looking for a partner that they can trust to help them understand and prioritize threats to strengthen their security posture, not just sell them the latest new product.

Q: If you could give one piece of advice to VikingCloud customers, what would it be?

A: With new AI-enabled cybercrime tools and services, the barrier to entry is so low now that anyone can become a cybercriminal overnight. Don’t let the complexity and drama of these new threats dissuade you from tackling these challenges and protecting your organization.

Jon’s knowledge and experience in cybersecurity and online payments have made him an essential part of the VikingCloud team. He has a real passion for technology and continuously strives to stay at the forefront of the latest cybersecurity trends, making him a leader and key contributor in the industry. We’re delighted he’s part of the VikingCloud product team.

Learn more about Jon on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jmarler/.