Bio:

The Blind Hacker (Joe Brinkley) is an offensive security researcher, mentor, speaker, and former Director of Red Team, currently serving as Director of Offensive Security, Research & Community. He is also the founder of NextGenRedTeam (NGRT), an independent research lab established in 2020 that went public with its offensive threat lab research, playbooks, and hardware rescues.

He believes deeply that mentoring others in the cybersecurity community through live streams, workshops, resume reviews, and mock interviews is vital. Through initiatives like the Dead Pixel Sec community and Mentor Village, he helps aspiring practitioners break into offensive security, refine their methodology, and secure high-impact roles.

Despite being completely blind, he constantly pushes technical boundaries, reverse-engineers legacy IoT hardware, builds agentic threat emulation labs, and advocates for accessibility in tech. He is a frequent speaker at events such as DerbyCon, GRIMMCon, BSides, Hack Space Con, and ISC2 webcasts, presenting on topics ranging from adversary emulation and threat telemetry to accessibility and soft skills for security engineers.