Founder & Executive Director of Intergenerational Computer Education (IgCE) and founder of Paragon Cyber. I design AI automation, security tooling, and workforce pipelines — from agentic red-team hardware to an AI chief-of-staff running my operations daily. Then I teach other people to do the same.
Panelist and academic-track presenter — "From Curiosity to Career: Launching High School Students into Cybersecurity" — hosted by an NSA/DHS-designated National Center of Academic Excellence in Cyber Defense Education.
View program →Selected presenter for Social Venture Partners Chicago's flagship Fast Pitch — pitching IgCE's CyberSecure Teens™ model live on the main stage.
Watch the pitch →IgCE programs backed by the Glenn W. Bailey Foundation and Steans Family Foundation, with an ISACA credentialing partnership and programs running inside Chicago community organizations.
iceprogram.org →An AI chief-of-staff that runs my mornings for me — daily briefs, task intelligence, and operational awareness delivered before I'm out of bed.
A disciplined agentic dev workflow — /spec, /build, /review — plus /cyberteam, a CISO-level security review framework that gates every technical decision I ship.
Full inventory POS with barcode-driven physical count mode, built for a City division managing 139 SKUs — replacing manual spreadsheet chaos.
Smart-glasses security tooling: look at a device, get live CVE intel; scan a QR code, get a phishing verdict — hands-free, in the field.
An autonomous red-team agent on edge hardware, run against an isolated practice range under strict rules-of-engagement scope control.
A single-file phishing analysis tool with ~20 heuristics and plain-English verdicts — built as a classroom lab, a lead-gen asset, and a working SOC teaching aid.
Full rebuild of IgCE's site — 15 static pages, 27 validated JSON-LD blocks, AI-crawler-ready GEO infrastructure, and gated lesson content driving email capture.
A phishing-recognition game for kids — swipe-style decisions, instant feedback, branded mascot — turning security awareness into play.
Real-time card-game coaching through smart glasses — a full rules engine with an isolated strategy layer, camera card detection, and webhook-driven advice.
IgCE's flagship: hands-on cybersecurity training for high schoolers — server rack builds, mesh networks, live OSINT exercises — running 33-session cohorts inside Chicago community organizations.
Digital literacy and scam-defense training for older adults — device-specific curriculum, confidence tracking, and graduation-day wins for an 11-participant cohort.
The pipeline from classroom to career — apprenticeships that place trainees on real client work through Paragon Cyber, IgCE's for-profit professional arm.
Running a nonprofit, an MSP, a City role, and a family of six means the mornings decide the day. Context lived in five apps and zero of them talked to each other.
A self-hosted automation chain that pulls operational data, runs it through Claude for synthesis and prioritization, and delivers a structured morning brief to Telegram — before the workday starts. Architecture kept deliberately lean: five nodes, one owner, no SaaS lock-in.
This is the same pattern I deploy for clients: AI that does work, not demos. Invoice triage, report generation, vendor follow-up — if it's repetitive and rules-driven, it can run itself.
Network infrastructure, monitoring, and managed IT for small and mid-size organizations — delivered with the discipline of a security-first shop.
Custom AI systems that eliminate repetitive operational work — AP and invoice automation, reporting, follow-up sequences — built on infrastructure you own.
CISO-level review of your systems, vendors, and digital footprint — including OSINT exposure assessments for executives and public-facing teams.
Security awareness and AI-adoption training that actually lands — the same hands-on, no-lecture approach that runs IgCE's classrooms.
I'm Michael Bass — Chicago-based, father of four, and allergic to theory that never ships.
My work sits at the intersection of three things most people treat as separate careers: deep cybersecurity practice, hands-on agentic AI engineering, and the ability to sell it, teach it, and build teams around it. I founded IgCE to train the next generation of security talent, and Paragon Cyber to give that talent somewhere real to work.
By day I coordinate inventory and property management inside the City of Chicago's Office of Public Safety Administration — which means I also know what it takes to build and operate systems inside government constraints, not just startups.
Everything on this page was built by me, end to end. Most of it is running right now.
Open to senior remote roles in security engineering, AI systems, and technical leadership. Resume, references, and live project walkthroughs on request.
Email me LinkedIn →Managed security, AI automation builds, exposure audits, and team training. Start with a conversation — no pitch deck required.
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