Marcus Sachs is a retired Army officer and was also a presidential appointee to the White House Office of Cyberspace Security in 2002-2003. While at the White House he authored parts of the National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace, and proposed the creation of what ultimately became the US-CERT at DHS.

During his Army career he was well known for tinkering with things technical and often found ways to circumvent traditional controls and constraints to achieve mission success. An avid ham radio operator, he was the custodian of two different MARS stations and helped with the engineering of large X.25 packet switching networks in the 1980s long before Netscape and the Internet came along. In 1994 he became known as the Voodoo Switchdoctor thanks to his expertise in building and running secure data networks in Haiti that supported military operations there. In 1998 he was selected by the SECDEF to be an initial member of the DoD's Joint Task Force for Computer Network Operations, where he served until he retired at the end of 2001. At the JTF he spent time chasing malicious actors at all levels, from script-kiddie hackers to terrorists to nation states that were attempting to do harm to DoD networks. After leaving government in 2003 he volunteered as the director of the SANS Internet Storm Center for seven years and became well known at Defcon for sporting his motorcycle leather in the Las Vegas heat.

Currently at Verizon, Marcus now serves on several public-private working groups in the Washington D.C. area and is a frequent speaker at both technical as well as policy centric events and workshops. He holds degrees in Civil Engineering, Computer Science, and Science and Technology Commercialization, and is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Public Policy. He authored and teaches a three-day course in Critical Infrastructure Protection at the SANS Institute and is a licensed Professional Engineer in the Commonwealth of Virginia.