Les Bell

Les Bell has a long, varied and distinguished background in the IT industry as a consultant, writer, software developer, educator and international seminar presenter. In a career spanning more than 30 years his interests have covered a wide range of topics including information security, operating systems, programming languages, software development and the Internet.

For the past several years Les’s focus has been on information security. He is a prominent member of the worldwide information security community where his specialties include probabilistic risk assessment, cryptography, protocols, analysis and formal methods.

As a consultant Les has worked on a variety of projects. His client list includes major banks and insurance companies, telecommunications agencies, government departments and computer multinationals.

In addition to his consultancy Les is very much involved as an educator. He has developed and personally presented a range of high-level courses on topics such as CISSP, Linux (Les is a Red Hat Certified Engineer), TCP/IP, Java and e-commerce in addition to his acclaimed courses on operating systems. His seminars have been presented to outstanding reviews in several countries around the world including Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Hong Kong, Beijing, the UK and Ireland.

As a technical journalist Les has written many series of articles covering a wide range of topics including operating systems, programming languages and software development. He was Founding Editor of Your Computer magazine and Founding Editor of the international journal PC Support Advisor as well as being a regular contributor to journals such as PC User magazine.

In all his work Les brings to bear a hard-hitting and practical perspective. Rather than getting bogged down in theory for it’s own sake, Les’s objective and skill is to take a complex subject and explain it in such a way as to make it both understandable and useful.

Les is a lecturer and tutor on information security at Macquarie University where he is currently in the final stages of a PhD working on probabilistic extensions to formal methods and tools for security-and safety-critical systems.

Les is renowned for his encyclopaedic knowledge and has no spare time.