Special Guest - Ron Tafoya

hello I'm ronoa um I am currently the president of the igard chapter for New Mexico um in terms of real work I work for AT&T as a cyber security person from the manage service Arena uh help provide uh manage security services for the entire state of Texas and I'm on the team that develops and puts together those Services through a state contract that is offered U via AT&T to manage those Services um I'm native New Mexican uh born like I guess this the way to say it I've been in security since I was in diapers I was born in Los alos while it was still a secure City uh I've lived up there for a few years um I've been

involved in a lot of different initiatives within the state of New Mexico U everything from uh being the director of the technology Enterprise division which deals with technology transfer from the National Labs into the private sector as well as U president of the Hispanic chamber for a period of time there and I ran my own business here in Albuquerque also um I've been doing cyber security I think I think my resume says 20 years but it's a little longer than that uh I've been involved with all kinds of initiatives I put together one of the first electronic submission uh and receiving packages for uh Insurance uh processing um that was a long time ago I recently a couple of two

three years ago I um was working with a secretary of state in New Mexico to help with all their cyber security polic and that kind of thing and now as the president of inard which is really the thing I want to speak to you about uh I I am involved in infart which is a partnership between the FBI and the private sector it's one of the largest public private Partnerships in the nation um we we deal with u all sorts of infrastructure areas uh utilities um government military the labs um you name it Communications Financial arena there are 16 areas of infrastructure that are focused on with infert and what what the inag guard chapters seek out for membership is

people who are either employed or were previously employed in those sectors and it provides a a forum or you have access to the FBI to an infart portal and we get uh the same advisories that the president gets on infrastructure threats and risks uh we also get uh in some cases classified presentations so if you join INF card you are going to go through a background check cut um um there are also a lot of open events where we invite other people in U we have a u site on LinkedIn itself so if you look up the New Mexico art chapter that's open to the public it's screened by the board of our local chapter only but you don't have to be a

chapter member to join that group okay and it announces our events that sort of thing um but the the the benefits that you get in infart are the exchange of information with the FBI and the networking with them you get to know who these people are I have U one of the agents is is uh it's called Uh PC which is our our coordinator for the chapter and I was in a meeting with him yesterday and all a sudden he got pulled into a SWAT team thing um I do want to take just a moment uh because I was just in the meeting PR coming here I was outside in the me so many of you probably already know

there's a glch going on on uh right now with Crow strike and with Microsoft okay so the latest skinny that I have from this was uh it was a crow strip Falcon U uh patch and uh the results of the patch were not what they were anticipating U it's been causing blue screens on Microsoft and for that reason a lot of systems including uh those that manage uh airplanes are down so there are some flights that are down there's a lot of things that are down at this point from what I can tell the only work around is to revert back to the the previous prior to the patch uh set of systems they're working

on other things right now but that was one of the things that I just got L of while I was outside and I thought I better show you um we have a table set up outside Nathan is here with me he's up there um we'll be sharing a little bit of literature that gives you all the information on how to join what are the requirements and also uh a lot of uh information on some of the things we do but it's a very worthwhile uh Endeavor and a place where not only do you get the FBI information but you get information from your peers there are uh 17 chapters throughout the nation 880,000 members of the inard nation

line 16 inag guard uh Focus areas for infrastructure uh we're currently in the planning stages for uh a potential Conference next uh spring that's going to focus on Cyber hygiene uh iot and AI for the agricultural businesses in New Mexico uh surprisingly enough uh there's a lot of new iot in that area a lot of uh data Gathering use of AI to analyze what's going on with the gro systems so that means there's exposure for malicious threats and things of that nature well I thank you for your time that's really all I have if you have any questions of me or want to catch me when I'm walking around or at our table please feel free thank you