Scott Jarkoff just so happens to be the name that I have been adorned with, as fortunate or unfortunate as that may be. Since 1990 I have been living in central Japan, the most exciting part of this beautiful island nation.
My name, as peculiar as it sounds, originates from the Russian name zarkov. How it evolved in to what you see before your very eyes remains a mystery, but I suspect it was some paper-pusher on Ellis Island having some fun processing immigrants with names he could barely comprehend. I am originally from Los Angeles, California and was born really close to Christmas.
I was first introduced to computers in my first year of Junior High School, when I was placed in a computer class. We were taught using Radio Shack TRS-80, and immediately fell in love with its capabilities. This led me toward wanting to play with computers at home, at which point I ended up with an infamous Commodore VIC-20, followed by the Commodore 64, Timex Sinclair, and an Amiga 500. One of my neighbors even had an Apple II, which led to me getting an Apple IIe, and I was completely mesmerized and entranced by the technology.
During my relationship with the VIC-20 I would buy magazines with BASIC programs printed on the pages, designed to be manually typed-in on the computer. After spending hours typing my poor fingers into arthritic pain, I was finally able to play the game or use the neat tool I just built. At this point I then saved the programs to cassette tape using an add-on, so that I could create more programs while still being able to recall this for later use.
In 1990 I joined the United States Navy and got shipped over to Bahrain in order to meet my new home: the USS Blue Ridge. The vessel is home ported in Yokosuka, Japan, which is where I lived for my first fifteen years in Japan. I separated from the Navy in 1999 in order to pursue more exciting opportunities rather than be whisked away from my life at the whim of the government.
Professional Information
I am a Certified Information Systems Security Professional, otherwise known as a CISSP, performing work for the US government while working as an expat in Tokyo, Japan. By trade, I am a network security professional, having been employed in this field for the past 20 years. Previous I served as the Chief of Cyber Security for the headquarters for all U.S. military forces in Japan, supervising and managing all aspects of the cyber security program and the personnel tasked with conducting such work, as well as overseeing the cyber security readiness state in Japan. Other than managenent of cyber security, I also worked very closely with our Japanese counterparts, exchanging information, tactics, techniques and procedures for effectively protecting networks from attack.
After I departed my time with the United States Department of Defense I went to work for McAfee Japan, based in Shibuya in the heart of Tokyo, where I focused on the public sector. In this role, I applied my firsthand defense-grade security expertise governing U.S. DoD and cross-government information systems to deliver thought leadership, robust security solutions, and cyber intelligence capabilities centered around the McAfee device-to-cloud integrated security system.
I am currently working for CrowdStrike as the Director, Strategic Threat Advisory Group (STAG), APJ & EMEA.
I also volunteer as the Chapter President of AFCEA 東京 TOKYO, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to STEM awareness and education. AFCEA 東京 TOKYO provides back to the community in the form of free seminars and training on STEM related topics, which means a strong emphasis on cyber security and information technology, as well as awarding STEM grants and scholarships to students wishing to pursue further STEM-related schooling. I direct all operations, and manage and small team of highly motivated colleagues interested in helping those in need. It is an incredibly rewarding experience that has paid dividends in cultivating new friendships and seeing the joy on a students face when their hard work is rewarded.
deviantART
In my so-called “spare time” I enjoy developing richly interactive community oriented web sites and other internet related projects. In the summer of 2000 a friend of mine and I founded a little ole web site you might have heard of before: deviantART. I was the sole developer, having programmed the backend powering the site for its first few years of life in addition to the very basic interface. Back then we still used tables for site designs so it was not too difficult. Nowadays I would never be able to put together such a design as my CSS skills are much to be desired. In 2006 deviantART was in the top 300 most trafficked web sites on the internet, receiving 20 million page-views per day, and has risen well above that lately. Oddly the site rarely gets a mention in the Web 2.0 clique, probably because of the audience deviantART panders to. Unfortunately, I no longer work on the site; that is an epic story set for another era.
Since around 1994 I have dabbled in web technologies and have fun quite a few web sites, most of which faltered before they really took shape. The first successful website that I ran was named CyberTropix, an MP3 “news” website. Since that day I have been involved in a number of different projects throughout the life of the internets.