Simon Gurney
Chief Technology Officer at OWASP Newcastle Chapter
Northallerton, England, United Kingdom
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolSimon Gurney is a pragmatic CTO and DevSecOps specialist with eight years of experience architecting secure, auditable development lifecycles and leading Punk Security’s fully-managed DevSecOps service. He combines deep hands-on skills—from network and cloud infrastructure to automation and security tooling—with leadership roles including OWASP Newcastle Chapter Lead and prior senior engineering posts in enterprise and ISP environments. Simon’s background spans VMware and large-scale networking, firewalls, Splunk monitoring and scripting automation, enabling him to translate compliance needs (ISO27001, PCI-DSS) into operational controls that save time and cost. An active security engineer, he contributes to open-source tooling like dnsReaper—improving subdomain takeover detection with tests and automated checks—highlighting his focus on practical, measurable risk reduction. He holds a master’s in Information Assurance and a reputation for turning complex security programmes into tangible, momentum-driven outcomes.
8 years of coding experience
3 years of employment as a software developer
BTEC Level 2 NVQ Level 3 ECDL(1-7) IT Cisco Radio and Satellite Theory, BTEC Level 2 NVQ Level 3 ECDL(1-7) IT Cisco Radio and Satellite Theory at DCAE CosfordMaster’s Degree Computer and Information Systems Security/Information Assurance, Master’s Degree Computer and Information Systems Security/Information Assurance at Leeds Beckett University
Github Skills (11)
unit-testing10
security-testing10
pytest10
python10
unit-test10
aws9
refactoring8
shopify8
refactor8
github-pages8
network-security7
Programming languages (10)
Github contributions (5)
punk-security/dnsReaper
Jul 2022 - Jan 2023
dnsReaper - subdomain takeover tool for attackers, bug bounty hunters and the blue team!
Role in this project:
Backend Developer & Security Engineer
Backend Developer & Security EngineerContributions:18 releases, 22 reviews, 138 commits in 5 months
Contributions summary:Simon's commits primarily focused on enhancing the security analysis capabilities of the `dnsreaper` tool. They added comprehensive unit tests, validating the potential and actual exploit conditions for various subdomain takeover scenarios, specifically targeting platforms like GitHub Pages, Shopify, and AWS. They also refactored the codebase to improve code reuse and efficiency, and included a module to perform automated registered status checks for identified vulnerable domains, improving the tool's ability to detect potentially exploitable vulnerabilities. Further modifications included a refactor of generic utility functions into separate files to enhance code organization.
huntersbluebugbountysecurityblue-team
punk-security/smbeagle
May 2021 - Jul 2022
SMBeagle - Fileshare auditing tool.
Contributions:3 releases, 14 reviews, 82 commits in 1 year 1 month
securitysecurity-toolsfileshareauditing
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