Jubilian Ho Hong Yi

The work the panel recognised

The Rising Star category honours people early in a career who already make defenders elsewhere better. Ho fits that brief. As a penetration tester at Ensign InfoSecurity, he spends his time finding the flaws that matter before an attacker does, across vulnerability assessment, source code review and exploit development. The OSCP behind his name is an examined, hands-on certification, so it stands for demonstrated practice rather than a title.

His Black Hat Europe 2023 Arsenal session on malicious NFTs turned that practice outward. He walked an international audience through how the Web3 stack gets abused, then translated the findings into plain guidance: check that a site is legitimate before connecting a wallet, treat free or promotional NFTs with suspicion, keep data hygiene tight in blockchain development. Sharing a method openly, so others can defend against it, is exactly the habit the category is meant to surface.

Bringing others in

Ho also mentors people trying to break into security, the part of the work that does not show up on a CV. A field that needs more defenders is built one conversation at a time, and the people who give that time quietly are the ones a Rising Star award exists to find. The panel judged the cyber security record against the published criteria, and that is what this page records.