Gene Yu (Chinese: 余靖) is a United States Military Academy graduate, former U.S. Army Special Forces officer and author.

During the final stages of his U.S. Army Special Forces Qualification Course in December 2005, Yu was in the Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) phase of the program.

In the final days of the evasion portion of the school and motivated by hunger, Yu left the boundaries of the exercise and came upon a group of Guatemalans in the North Carolina forest.

After reaching Aberdeen and being rejected by a convenience store when he tried to pay using his ID and memorized credit card number, Yu directed the group to a Papa John's Pizza's location and ordered pizzas and other food, knowing he could pay with his ID and without an actual physical credit card, as he had done in the past at other Papa John’s restaurants.

During his tours of duty, Yu conducted hostage rescue missions in Baghdad and coordinated 5,000 Filipino marines and soldiers in an attack on an Abu Sayyaf base.

Initially, the Abu Sayyaf group that held Chang asked for millions of dollars, but their monetary demands fluctuated wildly throughout their discussions.

Despite their differences, the groups were able to locate Chang in an Abu Sayyaf jungle base camp in the Southern Philippine island province of Sulu.

[13] Parallels to the Chang An-wei incident were made to the later kidnapping in April 2014 of Chinese national Gao Huayun and Filipino hotel staffer Marcy Dayawan.

Yu also worked as Director of Channels at Perx, loyalty-based mobile CRM platform with an automated and targeted marketing messaging system based in Singapore, chaired by Eduardo Saverin,[4] and as Vice President of Corporate Development at migme Limited, a Foxconn-backed social entertainment platform and public company on the Australian Stock Exchange.

[14][15] Yu partnered with Barron Lau, former CEO of Round5 (the licensee of official UFC and Bruce Lee action figurines) and Carol Chen, an apparel manufacturer for developing designs based in Chinese culture.

[16][17] Yu is currently the CEO of Blackpanda, Asia's first combined physical-cyber incident response group, specializing in coverage of Asia-Pacific and hyper-focused on digital forensics and cyber crisis response and management;[18] Resorts World Manila notably contracted the company to review its security procedures following the 2017 Resorts World Manila attack.