Benjamin Walters
Professional background
Benjamin was a core engineer on the Pronghorn HPC platform capstone at Grand Canyon University, working across the full stack of physical and logical infrastructure alongside the team lead. Beyond Pronghorn, he built a virtualized Security Operations Center lab environment using VMware, deploying Wazuh, TheHive, Cortex, and Shuffle to monitor a Windows target against a Kali Linux attacker. He integrated VirusTotal automation through Cortex/Shuffle so high-severity SIEM alerts were automatically enriched with threat intelligence. Through the project he built familiarity with SIEM tooling, incident detection workflows, and security automation. He is currently consulting on a small business network redesign involving VLAN segmentation and firewall implementation.
Technical expertise
Operating systems and provisioning: Ubuntu Linux administration and hardening, Active Directory and Domain Controller deployment. Networking: UniFi infrastructure, VLAN design and segmentation, firewall configuration, fiber and NIC configuration, physical network deployment. HPC and compute: Slurm workload scheduler configuration, Linux cluster deployment. Automation and containerization: Ansible playbooks, bash scripting, Docker containerization. Application development: Full-stack web application development including frontend, backend, and REST API design for HPC workload submission. Security tooling (lab-scale): VMware hypervisor, Wazuh SIEM, TheHive, Cortex, Shuffle, Kali Linux, Windows monitoring and incident detection workflows. VirusTotal integration via Cortex/Shuffle for automated threat intelligence enrichment. Specialization: cross-layer systems integration — the layer where networking, operating systems, identity services, automation, and applications all have to work together.
Education
B.S. in Cybersecurity, Grand Canyon University, 2026. Capstone: Pronghorn high-performance computing platform. CompTIA Security+ certification in progress.
His role at Westwind
Co-Founder and Systems Engineer. Benjamin focuses on systems integration and security-aware infrastructure work, partnering with the team’s hardware lead on physical deployments and with the consulting lead on client engagements. His responsibility covers networking, operating system configuration, identity services, automation, and application delivery. Security is part of how he thinks about every layer of the work, and he is continuing to build that expertise through ongoing study.