Aaron Turner is a multi-decade veteran of the InfoSec community. Born and raised in rural Idaho, his curiosity into how all technologies work motivated him to reverse engineer nearly any kind of machine he could find on his family’s ranches and orchards. From electric drills to small combustion engines, he took them apart and tried to put them back together (with a moderate level of success and some spectacular failures). Beginning in the late 1980’s, he began reverse engineering how computing systems worked. By the mid-90’s he was performing penetration tests on nights and weekends as he was attending law school. Realizing that he would have much more fun messing around with computers than worrying about hourly rates and billable time, he dropped out of law school and Microsoft hired him to run one of the first security-focused teams within the company. His time at Microsoft led to opportunities at the US DOE’s Idaho National Laboratory, where his reverse engineering passion was focused on power grids and cell networks. He co-invented several technologies at INL, helped to patent them and ran a venture-backed startup to commercialize them. A few years later, he started another company based on another set of inventions focusing on discovering credit card skimmers in ATMs and unattended payment terminals, selling that technology to Verifone in 2015. Aaron is now the co-founder and CEO of Hotshot, a high-security collaboration platform designed to overcome many of the vulnerabilities in mobile networks and devices while addressing compliance requirements like HIPAA and GDPR.
