Cybersecurity mentoring sessions
Meet one-on-one with cybersecurity professionals, explore career paths, and get personalized advice from industry experts.
Oct 17, 2026 — 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Meet one-on-one with cybersecurity professionals, explore career paths, and get personalized advice from industry experts.
Event details
Interested in a career in cybersecurity?
As part of the OWASP Ottawa 25th Anniversary Celebration, students are invited to connect one-on-one with cybersecurity professionals and learn about careers in the field.
Whether you're exploring your options, preparing for internships, or seeking advice from industry professionals, these informal mentoring sessions offer an opportunity to ask questions, gain career insights, and hear firsthand experiences from people working in cybersecurity.
Mentors come from a variety of backgrounds and career stages and can share perspectives on topics such as education, job searching, professional development, and day-to-day work in the industry.
To book a mentoring session, browse the mentor profiles below and contact the mentors you'd like to meet with directly by email to arrange a meeting time during the event.
Meetings will be booked on a first come, first served basis.
Garth Boyd
Security Architect, Devious Plan
Language: English
Senior Application Security/Cloud Security Architect specializing in Secure Software Architecture and Ethical Hacking with experience supporting development organizations wishing a designer, creator, and breaker to help them on their security path. Founder of DeviousPlan, a boutique security firm specializing in Security Architecture, Threat Modelling, Securing the public cloud, Security Training, and Penetration Testing. A lifelong learner who enjoys crafting solutions to interesting and tough problems through architecture, threat modelling, mitigation design, and penetration testing. Researching new ideas, troubleshooting, communication, and thinking of six impossible things before breakfast are part of the journey.
Magno Logan
CTO / Staff Security Engineer, GoHacking
Language: English
Magno Logan is Head of Product Security at Fellow, where he focuses on AI security. He has published research on Kubernetes, container, and CI/CD supply-chain attacks, contributed to the MITRE ATT&CK for Containers matrix, and maintains the awesome-k8s-security repository on GitHub. Magno also serves as a Cyber Training Specialist at the Bank of Canada and has presented at DEF CON, SecTor, NorthSec, KubeCon, NDC Security, multiple SANS summits, and numerous BSides events.
His main areas of interest are Application Security, Product Security, DevSecOps, Cloud Security, AI Security, and Security Research.
Harsh Makwana
Security Architect, Morgan Stanley
Language: English
Harsh Makwana is a security architect and former application security consultant specializing in AI security and offensive security. He holds an MEng from the University of Ottawa and certifications including eWPTXv2 and eJPT. Harsh previously practiced offensive security as part of his appsec work and now focuses on securing systems, early in their design phase, well before they reach production by evaluating real attack surfaces and applying practical, hands‑on security techniques across modern cloud and AI‑driven environments.
Sunny Verma
Ethical Hacker, Packetlabs Ltd.
Language: English
Sunny Verma is an offensive security practitioner with 5+ years of experience performing penetration testing activities on web applications and networks owned by organizations ranging from SMBs to Fortune-100 companies. In his new role at Payments Canada, he will be helping secure the backbone of Canada's Payment Infrastructure using his offensive security skillset.
Diane Watson
Product Security Program Manager, Ribbon Communications
Language: English
Diane Watson has spent over 20 years in the rooms where telecom, cloud, and cybersecurity meet at Fujitsu, Nokia, and now Ribbon Communications, where she leads product security for customers in banking, government, telecom, and other critical infrastructure as a Product Security Program Manager. She holds an MSc in Computer Science. But ask anyone who's worked with her and they'll tell you the through-line isn't the tech it's the people she's quietly pulling up alongside her.