Randy Marchany is the information technology security officer and director of the IT Security Lab at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech).

Marchany has been involved in the computer industry since 1972 and has made many contributions in the field of cyber security on a national level as well as within higher education.

As coauthor of the original SANS Top 10 and Top 20 Internet Threats documents, Marchany set the standard for most computer security and auditing software. His SANS document on the Consensus Roadmap for Defeating Distributed-Denial of Service (DDoS) Attacks was prepared at the request of the White House in response to the first major DDoS attacks responsible for crippling some of the Internet’s most popular websites in February 2000. As a member of the White House Partnership for Critical Infrastructure working group, Marchany helped develop the SANS Incident Response: Step-by-Step Guides, which are available for free and represent the first successful attempt to create a set of consensus documents with detailed steps for implementing system security.

Marchany has been a frequent speaker at such national and international conferences as EDUCAUSE, SANS, International CISO symposium, NY State OIT Security conference, and at such organizations as FBI-Infraguard chapters, US Forest and US Fish and Wildlife Services, and Air Force Material Command. He's been the subject of several articles in the Chronicle of Higher Education on security issues at university campuses.

Marchany was also a recipient of the SANS Institute's Security Technology Leadership Award in 2000 as well as the Virginia 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. He is also a co-holder of two cybersecurity patents one of which was for a battery-based intrusion detection system that was the product of research conducted in the Virginia Tech IT Security Lab.