About

Who am I?

My name is Becker Polverini. I am an evangelistic disciple of Jesus, a joyful husband and father, and a mischievous hacker. I once heard it said that computer scientists are just frustrated mathematicians. This is absolutely true for me. Yet, more true still, I identify as a frustrated theologian.

I have spent most of my life convincing people I am actually half-Mexican (nobody doubts the Italian-German half). I speak Spanish¹ and Mandarin.² I grew up in Los Angeles, spent years in Beijing and some months in Amman. The most beautiful place I have ever been is the mountains above Beirut. The best motorcycle ride I ever had was to Raleigh through four hours of rain in the summer. I currently reside in Knoxville, Tennessee. It is pronounced app-uh-latch-uh.

I am the Founder/CEO of Hacktera, a cybersecurity consulting firm. I did my undergrad at Princeton in Computer Science, dropped out of Columbia for my Ph.D. after one semester, toiled at Bridgewater Associates (a cult with a hedge fund), and worked at Microsoft Research in China. I started my first consulting business, PKC Security, in 2014 with two friends from college and two friends from China. We were written up in Wired for an attack we had on ApplePay. We sold the firm in 2019. We are still friends to this day. Entrepreneurship requires incredible amounts of brain damage to be fun. We succeeded in having fun. Caveat emptor.

I have received a US National Science Foundation grant, was awarded the Microsoft Research Asia Stars of Tomorrow Award, tied for first place at DEFCON29 in the cryptography capture-the-flag, and received the Christian Economic Forum’s Hope and a Future Award. I was formerly the Chair of the Computer Science Advisory Council at CalState Dominguez Hills and formerly an Adjunct Professor for programming language theory at San Francisco State.