Willis Vandevanter
Senior Penetration Tester
New York, New York, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolWillis Vandevanter is a Senior Penetration Tester with 14 years of hands-on offensive security experience, currently based in New York and leading assessments at Terra Security. He has a strong research pedigree—authoring SAP vulnerability advisories, presenting at Black Hat and DEF CON, and building exploit tooling—balanced with practical SecDevOps work like Zero Trust, container scanning, and observability. Willis has led and founded consulting practices with high client retention, delivered red team engagements for Fortune 20 customers, and recently focused on AI security at Trail of Bits. An active open-source contributor, he’s enhanced Serpico’s reporting and plugin system and developed XXE embedding tools that reflect deep protocol- and file-format-level expertise. His background combines a joint Math/CS degree from McGill and a master’s in secure software engineering with a rare mix of research, tool development, and operational security delivery.
14 years of coding experience
17 years of employment as a software developer
Masters, Secure Software Engineering, Masters, Secure Software Engineering at James Madison UniversityBachelor of Science, Joint Degree in Mathematics and Computer Science, Bachelor of Science, Joint Degree in Mathematics and Computer Science at McGill University
Github Skills (17)
file-manipulation10
security10
ruby10
exploit10
sinatra10
xml10
reporting-services10
xslt9
file-format9
template-engine9
filetype9
templater9
data-analysis9
plugin-development8
html7
Programming languages (10)
Github contributions (5)
BuffaloWill/oxml_xxe
Mar 2015 - Mar 2021
A tool for embedding XXE/XML exploits into different filetypes
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Security Engineer
Back-end Developer & Security EngineerContributions:2 reviews, 81 commits, 26 PRs in 6 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Willis primarily worked on a tool for embedding XXE/XML exploits into different file types. Their contributions centered around defining and implementing various XXE payloads within the Ruby code. They developed methods to insert these payloads into different file formats, including PDF, GIF, and images and added string replacement functionalities. Furthermore, the user refactored menus and address issues.
xmlxxe
BuffaloWill/gumbler
Oct 2014 - Apr 2018
Dig through Git commits and logs
Contributions:70 commits, 4 PRs, 62 pushes in 3 years 6 months
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