John Abel recently worked at Oracle Corporation as an Executive Consultant with the UK, specializing in security. This led John to working on well over 190 customer engagements, ranging from short-term projects to long-term multi-million-dollar assignments during his 12+ years with Oracle.
John has always enjoyed working at the edge of IT. One of his more interesting projects was working as part of a team to test and implement the first electronic e-voting system in the UK; security was the most important element of the application and required many hours of design and testing. A smaller but still interesting project was OpenHack IV, which involved deploying an application provided by eWeek magazine to allow hackers from anywhere in the world to attempt hacking the site. During the contest, over 68,000 attacks occurred from 2,100+ different IP addresses, providing John valuable insight into the hacking methods used by the very best.
John spends a lot of time traveling among customers and projects and also presents at a number of conferences, including Oracle OpenWorld, OUG UK, and the RSA Security Conference.