Dr. Richard Forno directs the UMBC Graduate Cybersecurity Program, serves as the Assistant Director of UMBC's Center for Cybersecurity, and was co-founder of the CyberMaryland conference. He is a Junior Affiliate Scholar at the Stanford Law School's Center for Internet and Society (CIS) and from 2005-2012 was a Visiting Scientist at the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University where he served as a course instructor for the CERT Coordination Center (CERT/CC).

Richard's twenty-year career includes helping build a formal cybersecurity program for the United States House of Representatives and serving as the first Chief Security Officer at Network Solutions (the InterNIC) where he designed and managed the global information assurance program for one of the Internet's most critical infrastructures. Since then, he has consulted with government, military and commercial clients on assorted projects pertaining to information operations, cybersecurity, and critical infrastructure protection. He was also one of the early researchers on the subject of "cyberwarfare" and he remains a longtime commentator on the influence of Internet technology upon society.

In 2001, Richard delivered American University's first modern course on information security and conducted regular guest lectures on information warfare and infrastructure protection at the National Defense University in Washington, DC from 2001-2003. Among other things, he was a founding member of the Academic Advisory Board for Northern Virginia Community College's Information Security Program, participated in the 2000 White House Office of Science and Technology Policy Information Security Education Research Project, and serves on the advisory boards of Secure Network Systems (2008-) and TapLink (2015-).

Richard continues to speak at government, industry, and academic symposia, and frequently provides expert commentary to the media. Along with several articles and papers written over the years, he is the co-author of O'Reilly's Incident Response (2001). Additionally, he contributed chapters to the books Cyberwar 2.0: Myths, Mysteries and Realities (1998) and Inventing Arguments (2005). 

Richard holds undergraduate and graduate degrees in international relations from American University and Salve Regina University, and is a graduate of Valley Forge Military College and the United States Naval War College. His doctoral research at Curtin University of Technology explored the complex nature of security informatics  and risk communication within Internet-based communities of practice.

In his spare time, Richard enjoys working out, tennis, SCUBA diving, and consuming fine coffee and sushi (though not at the same time.)

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