Daniel Cross is the lead security researcher at SecureStackPro. He has spent over eight years testing security software for small businesses, agencies, and development teams, with a particular focus on VPNs, password managers, and cloud infrastructure hardening.
Before joining SecureStackPro, Daniel worked as an infrastructure engineer supporting small business clients migrating to cloud platforms, which is where he first started noticing how often basic security misconfigurations — public storage buckets, exposed database ports, reused passwords — were the actual root cause of incidents, far more often than any sophisticated attack.
That experience shapes how he approaches every review published on this site: testing tools the way a small team would actually use them day to day, rather than relying on a vendor’s feature list or marketing copy. Every VPN, password manager, and cloud security guide on SecureStackPro reflects hands-on testing — installing the software, using it for real tasks, and documenting what actually holds up.
How Daniel approaches testing
Every review starts with the same basic questions: does this tool do what it claims under normal, real-world conditions, and would a small team without a dedicated security engineer actually be able to set it up correctly? Marketing claims are checked against independent audits where they exist, and noted clearly as unverified where they do not.
Daniel avoids recommending a tool purely because it is popular or heavily advertised. Several well-known products have been left out of comparisons on this site after testing revealed gaps between their marketing claims and their actual behavior — a kill switch that did not reliably trigger, or a “no-logs” claim without any supporting independent audit, for example.
Areas of focus
Daniel’s reviews on SecureStackPro currently cover VPN services for remote and hybrid teams, password manager platforms for small business credential sharing, and cloud infrastructure hardening for teams managing their own AWS or GCP environments without a dedicated security team. This coverage continues to expand as new reviews and guides are published.