Security Thought Leaders

Stephen Northcutt from the security laboratory conducts in depth interviews with the thought leaders in information security. For every novel security product, there is a thought leader, a man or woman of vision that sees the need and guides the creation of the security product. If there is someone missing whose voice you feel should be heard, drop me a note, stephen@sans.edu.

What is a Security Thought Leader - Updated November 18th, 2009

With the Security Thought Leader project Stephen hopes to introduce you to some really great men and women. A security thought leader can be defined by certain criteria: a person who is recognized by their peers as a thought leader, who passes their information on to help others, who has innovative ideas, and who shares ideas as actionable distilled insights.

Framework for Security Thought Leader Interview - August 26th, 2009

Stephen could certainly use your help in finding security thought leaders. If you know someone special that has made a major contribution to the field, please download our Security Thought Leader Interview framework, we'd love to learn more about them.

Ed Hammersla, COO, Trusted Computer Solutions - Updated November 19th, 2009

Ed Hammersla has a background in trusted systems, as in the Orange Book. He understands the mechanics of low to high information transfer.

Amit Klein, CTO, Trusteer - September 27th, 2009

Amit Klein, CTO of Trusteer, a provider of web browser security technology, tells us about himself and his current project, Rapport. It is designed to secure online transactions between compromised desktops and trusted financial websites.

An Interview with Ron Gula from Tenable about the role of a vulnerability scanner in protecting sensitive information - Updated August 13th, 2009

Tenable's Ron Gula gives us an update on Nessus which now performs many of the industry standard web application tests such as SQL injection and Cross Site Scripting analysis. This, combined with Tenable's database, application and operating system configuration audits, can provide a much deeper form of analysis than pure black-box testing.

A. N. Ananth, CEO, Prism Microsystems, Inc. - August 7th, 2009

A.N. Ananth, CEO of Prism Microsystems, Inc. was one of the original architects of the EventTracker product offering, Prism’s enterprise log management solution.

Lance Spitzner, The Honeynet Project, founder - Updated May 11th, 2009

Lance Spitzner of Honeynet fame has agreed to a Thought Leadership interview and we certainly thank him for his time.

Jeremiah Grossman, Founder and CTO of WhiteHat Security - Updated April 24th, 2009

Jeremiah Grossman, founder and CTO of WhiteHat Security, talks with Stephen Northcutt about the state of web application security as well as WhiteHat's approach to website vulnerability assessment and management.

Mike Yaffe, Director of Product Marketing, Core Security Technologies. - April 15th, 2009

Most of the interviews that we have done in this series have been focused on technical people, but we believe Mike Yaffe is a game changer.

Chris Petersen, Chief Technology Officer, LogRhythm - March 13th, 2009

Chris gives us his vision on the current state of log and event management as well as some specifics about LogRhythm.

John Pirc, IBM, ISS Product Line & Services Executive: Security and Intelligent Network - February 17th, 2009

John Pirc from IBM's Network Security Solutions has agreed to be interviewed by the Securitylab; we certainly thank him for giving us his time to discuss security and the Intelligent Network.

Leigh Purdie, InterSect Alliance, co-founder of Snare: Evolution of log analysis - January 28th, 2009

We asked Leigh Purdie if he would give us an update on Snare and log analysis, as a follow to our interview with him in March, 2008, and we certainly thank him for his time.

Bill Worley, Chief Technology Officer, Secure64 Software Corporation - December 9th, 2008

At larger conferences, the SANS Institute has a vendor show, and I like to attend to find out about new companies and new technology. There was a vendor at our last show in Las Vegas, Secure64. I had never heard of them, so I wandered over and we had a great chat. They are a DNSSEC vendor who sells a product based on the HP Itanium architecture. The more they talked, the more I learned about an incredible guy, a security thought leader named Bill Worley, so please let me introduce you to Bill.

Doug Brown, former Manager of Security Resources, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill - October 30th, 2008

One of the important concepts that we want to explore in security thought leadership is the idea of group or team thought leadership. And so we are looking for examples of teams that exhibited security thought leadership. Doug Brown, former Manager of Security Resources, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, was on a team that exhibits many of the characteristics of security thought leadership.

Amrit Williams, Chief Technology Officer, BigFix - June 30th, 2008

Amrit Williams, Chief Technology Officer at BigFix, was formerly a research director in the Information Security and Risk Research Practice at Gartner, Inc. He is certainly a security thought leader and if you have not been introduced to him before, we are sure you will find he has some interesting out of the box opinions.

Andrew Hay, Q1 Labs - May 13th, 2008

Andrew Hay, one of the authors of the popular OSSEC Host-Based Intrusion Detection Guide and upcoming Nagios 3 Enterprise Network Monitoring book has agreed to be interviewed for the SANS Security Thought Leader series.

Gene Schultz, CTO of High Tower - April 4th, 2008

The Security Laboratory is pleased to interview Dr. Gene Schultz, one of the most experienced security practitioners in the field.

Tomasz Kojm, original author of ClamAV - April 3rd, 2008

Tomasz Kojm is the original author of ClamAV, an open source (GPL) anti-virus toolkit for UNIX, designed especially for e-mail scanning on mail gateways.

Bill Johnson, CEO TDI - April 2nd, 2008

Bill Johnson, CEO TDI, was the first person in the industry, that I am aware of, to sound the clarion call that we might be vulnerable to attacks via the Baseboard Management Controller (BMC). That certainly qualifies him as a security thought leader, and we thank him for his time.

Gene Kim, Tripwire - March 14th, 2008

Gene Kim is one of the original authors of Tripwire, a software product used to manage configurations and change. Gene is willing to share his thoughts on virtualization with the Security Laboratory thought leadership series, and we certainly thank him for his time!

Kevin Kenan, Managing Director, K2 Digital Defense - March 14th, 2008

Imperva and a few other vendors are starting to understand the importance of database security and release product, but Kevin Kenan, Managing Director, K2 Digital Defense picked up on this long ago.

Leigh Purdie, InterSect Alliance, co-founder of Snare - March 7th, 2008

Perhaps, one of the hottest topics in 2008 is log file analysis (who would have guessed). And while the commercial tools are getting a lot of the press, an open source and also commercial tool is ending up on a lot of systems. It is called Snare and Leigh Purdie is the thought leader behind the project. He has been willing to invest the time for a thought leadership interview with the Security Laboratory

Marty Roesch, Sourcefire CEO and Snort creator - February 26th, 2008

I keep thinking about the news reports that Chinese hackers managed to exfiltrate six terabytes of sensitive data from a large number of systems belonging to the Department of Homeland Security in November 2007. It seems like that would be impossible to do without being detected. But, I have to wonder, since the famous Richard Stiennon paper, Intrusion Detection is Dead, organizations have been replacing IDS with IPS, and maybe, just maybe, they think the devices do their job in some kind of "fire and forget" mode. Sourcefire was kind enough to allow me to interview Snort creator and Sourcefire CEO Marty Roesch on this topic.

Dr. Anton Chuvakin, Chief Logging Evangelist with LogLogic - January 28th, 2008

Dr. Anton Chuvakin from LogLogic is probably the number one authority on system logging in the world, and his employer is probably the leading vendor for logging, so we appreciate this opportunity to share in his insights.

Kishore Kumar, CEO of Pari Networks - January 23rd, 2008

One of the ongoing research projects in the Security Laboratory is to work with the thought leaders in information security to get an understanding of their vision for our industry. We have recently had the honor of working with Kishore Kumar, CEO of Pari Networks, and we certainly thank him for his time.

Interview with Dr. Robert Arn, CTO of Itiva - November 1st, 2007

The Leadership lab came across an interesting company, Itiva. Their CTO, Dr. Robert Arn, was kind enough to share his time and thoughts with our readers, and we certainly thank him for his time.

Interview with Charles Edge - September 15th, 2007

Charles Edge talks with Stephen Northcutt about security issues in the Mac world; even though the core OS is pretty safe, there are vulnerabilities that every Mac user should be aware of.

Ivan Arce, CTO of Core Security Technologies - Updated May 6th, 2009

Ivan Arce, Chief Technology Officer of Core Security Technologies, sets the technical direction for the company and is responsible for overseeing the development, testing and deployment of all Core products. He talks with us here about the recent update to their product to include web application testing, the latest web attack techniques, and his security philosophy.

Mike Weider, CTO for Watchfire - Updated July 23rd, 2007

Stephen Northcutt interviews Mike Weider, CTO of Watchfire, regarding recent trends in web app vulnerabilities as well as his company's solutions for web application security.

Interview with authors of The Art of Software Security Assessment - Updated July 9th, 2007

The Leadership Laboratory recently posted a book review of The Art of Software Security Assessment. The book raises a number of issues that we would love to explore further and the authors, Mark Dowd, John McDonald and Justin Schuh have graciously agreed to an interview. One section was titled Code Auditing and the Development Life Cycle and we used that as the basis of the interview.

Ryan Barnett, Director of Application Security Training at Breach Security, Inc. - June 29th, 2007

Ryan Barnett, Director of Application Security Training at Breach Security, Inc. talks with Stephen Northcutt about the current state of web application security.

Dinis Cruz, Director of Advanced Technology, Ounce Labs - June 11th, 2007

Dinis Cruz, Director of Advanced Technology for Ounce Labs, talks with Stephen Northcutt about the many facets of OWASP, as well as the important questions that need real answers in order to develop secure web applications.

Brian Chess, Chief Scientist for Fortify Software - June 9th, 2007

Brian Chess, Chief Scientist for Fortify Software, talks with Stephen Northcutt about static analysis and other web application security solutions.

Caleb Sima, CTO for SPI Dynamics - Updated May 29th, 2007

Stephen Northcutt interviews Caleb Sima about the development of Caleb's company, SPI Dynamics, and the increasing need for solutions for web application security.

An Interview with David Hoelzer, author of DAD, a log aggregator - May 1st, 2007

An interview with David Hoelzer describing DAD, an open source Windows event log and syslog management tool that allows you to aggregate logs from hundreds to thousands of systems in real time.