James Smith
James Smith, Chief Innovation Officer of Twotrees Technologies, LLC, is an accomplished entrepreneur and programmer with a strong academic foundation in business and finance.
With a lifelong passion for technical computing and programming, James began his career providing programming and consulting services as an independent contractor. He specialized in UNIX systems, communications, and statistical data analysis, working with prominent companies like NCR and IBM. In the early 1980s, he founded a company that became a MicroAge franchise in 1984, which evolved to what is now Twotrees Technologies, LLC.
He developed the pioneering Willow Crawler and Blackjack Crawler web indexing systems during the early days of the Internet, which laid the foundation for the Shelterbelt Internet Management and Filtering System. Shelterbelt was widely adopted, serving hundreds of U.S. schools from the late 1990s until its retirement in 2016. While the Shelterbelt system has since been discontinued, the Willow and Blackjack Crawlers remain active today. These advanced systems now utilize AI and large language models (LLMs) to gather and analyze data across the dark web, demonstrating their ongoing relevance and adaptability in the evolving digital landscape.
James' expertise spans numerous programming languages, including Assembler, LISP, Perl 5, PHP, Java/JavaScript, Ruby, C, C++, and C#. His work covers a wide range of protocols such as Serial, SNA, LU6.2, and TCP/IP, and he has extensive experience with UNIX System V, IBM AIX, SGI IRIX, and Linux operating systems.
As CIO of Twotrees, James focuses on designing and architecting development projects, leveraging his deep knowledge of data communications, text and statistical analysis, encryption, supercomputing, and grid computing with UNIX. He also oversees the company’s onshore and offshore development teams. Beyond his work at Twotrees, James has served on various industry advisory councils and has contributed his expertise in enterprise Internet security and network management through various other roles.
Session
Cybercriminals don’t always need to defeat the best security—they just need to find an easier target. Don’t Be the Low Hanging Fruit challenges IT leaders to take a hard look at the assumptions behind their security strategy. We’ll examine how attackers are getting around MFA, exploiting legitimate credentials, targeting privileged access and vendors, attacking backups, and using AI to make social engineering more convincing than ever. Using real-world breaches and lessons from nearly 30 years of working with computers and the Internet, we’ll ask the questions that matter: If an attacker already had a valid credential, what would stop them? Would you know they were there? And is your organization harder to attack than the one next door?