After studying software engineering and computer science at the University of Queensland, Richard started his working life as a Solaris sysadmin at the University of Queensland before joining the AUSCERT coordination centre team and later managing it.

Eventually the lure of financial crime and fraud (or preventing and detecting them, of course) drew Richard across to Suncorp Group where he joined the Security Threat Analysis and Response Team. After a couple of years Richard started managing that team as a rebuild and upgrade of the Incident response and SOC capability kicked off.

Following that, and a quick year testing the waters as a security architect at Suncorp, Richard joined the AWS Customer Incident Response Team where he helps customers of all sizes who are having a bad day in the cloud.