Randy Marchany
Randy Marchany is a hammered dulcimer player, who, along with Wes Chappell and Suzy Gorsline, is one of the original hammer dulcimer players for the band No Strings Attached, with which he has been since 1980. He plays the hammered dulcimer and keyboards, and was trained as a classical pianist. He took up the instrument in 1978. An award-winning quartet, No Strings Attached's music has been described as "eclectic, jazz on acoustic instruments and world beat". The eclectic brand of music they play has allowed them to open for such artists as Mary Wilson and the Supremes, Bela Fleck and the Flecktones, Nickel Creek, Doc Watson, Stephen Bennett, Tommy Emmanuel, the Dixie Chicks, Turtle Island String Quartet, John Hartford, Hot Club of Cowtown, Hot Rize, Alison Krause and Union Station, and John McCutcheon. They have played in European venues such as Cardiff Harbour Festival, (Wales), the Pontardarwe Festival (Wales), the Cork Music Festival (Ireland), Folk Club Zuriche (Switzerland) and in U.S. venues ranging from the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and CBS TV's Morning News program. Marchany started teaching workshops on hammer technique at the California Traditional Music Society's Summer Solstice festival in 1984. Since then, he and Chappell have taught at various workshops and camps such as the Augusta Heritage Arts Workshops in Elkins, West Virginia, the Swannanoa Gathering in Black Mountain, North Carolina, and the Walnut Valley Festival in Winfield, Kansas. He experiments with different styles of music on the hammered dulcimer and loves to play swing and jazz tunes on the instrument.
He is acknowledged as one of the North American masters of the hammer dulcimer. He was the author of the original theme song of National Public Radio's nationally syndicated radio program, "World Cafe". His band, "No Strings Attached" was nominated for or won "Indie" awards (independent record label's version of the Grammy) for Best Album (String Music) category in 1984, 1985, 1986, 1988, 1990.
Marchany is a native of Virginia and went to Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg, Virginia.
In another life, he is the University Information Security Officer for Virginia Tech. He is also the director of the IT Security Lab, a component of the university's IT Security Office.
He is the author of VA Tech's Acceptable Use Statement and a co-author of the original FBI/SANS Institute's "Top 10/20 Internet Security Vulnerabilities" document that has become a standard for most computer security and auditing software. He is the co-author of the SANS Institute's "Responding to Distributed Denial of Service Attacks" document that was prepared at the request of the White House in response to the DDOS attacks of 2000. He was part of the SANS Institute's Secure Code project that developed a set of exams to test programmers' knowledge of secure coding techniques.He has been a member of the SANS Institute's faculty since 1992 and developed its original IT Audit course.
He is a co-author of the EDUCAUSE "Computer and Network Security in Higher Education" booklet. He is a member of the EDUCAUSE security task force focusing on risk assessment and security metrics. He was a coauthor of the original Center for Internet Security's series of Security Benchmark documents for Solaris, AIX and Windows2000.
He is one of the founders of the Virginia Alliance for Secure Computing and Networking (www.vascan.org), a consortium of security practitioners and researchers from VA Tech, U of Virginia, James Madison Univ., George Mason Univ.
He has been a frequent speaker at national and international conferences such as SANS, IIA, ISACA, ACUA, Network Security, IEEE Symposium on Systems Management, NIST, NY State OIT Security conference, FBI-Infraguard chapters, US Forest & Wildlife Service, Computer Security Conference, DECUS-Canada, Air Force Material Command, EDUCAUSE and ACUA. He's been the subject of articles in the Chronicle of Higher Education on security issues at university campuses.
He was a recipient of the SANS Institute's Security Technology Leadership Award for 2000. He was a recipient of the VA Governor's Technology Silver Award in 2003. He was part of the team that won the EDUCAUSE Excellence in Information Technology Solutions Award in 2005.
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