2012 Google Seminar Series Opens with Two Leaders

Published February 2, 2012

The Google and University of Maryland Cybersecurity Seminar Series will feature two thought leaders in industry to open the Spring 2012 Semester.

Alan Paller, Director of Research at the SANS Institute, will speak on February 23, 2012 at 5:30 pm in the Chemistry Building Lecture Hall, Room 1407. The title of his talk will be “Six People Who Changed the World of Security: The Impact in 2012.”

Marcus Ranum, Chief Security Officer of Tenable Network Security, will speak on March 8th, 2012 at 5:30 pm in the Computer Science Instruction Center, Lecture Hall 115. The title of his talk will be “Parsing the Cyber War Battlefield.”

The events are free and open to the campus community and friends in industry, government and non-profit organizations. Registration is required.

Guests can register for the Feb. 23 talk by Alan Paller by email at http://talks.cs.umd.edu/lists/3

Guests can register for the Mar. 8 talk by Marcus Ranum by email at http://talks.cs.umd.edu/lists/3

Alan Paller is the founder and research director of the SANS Institute, a graduate degree granting college and security training and research institution with more than 135,000 alumni in seventy-two countries. At SANS, he oversees the Internet Storm Center (an early warning system for the Internet), NewsBites, (the semi-weekly security news summary that goes to 210,000 people), and the annual publication of the “Seven Most Dangerous New Attack Vectors” being discovered each year. He leads a global security innovation program that identifies people and practices that have made a measureable difference in cyber risk reduction, and illuminates those innovations so other security practitioners can take full advantage of them to improve security in their enterprises. He is also one of the founders of the U.S. Cyber Challenge.

He has testified multiple times before both the US Senate and House of Representatives. In 2000 President Clinton recognized his leadership by naming him as one of the initial members of the President’s National Infrastructure Assurance Council. In May of 2010, the Washington Post named Alan one of seven people as “worth knowing, or knowing about” in cyber security. Earlier in his career Alan helped build a software company, took it public, and merged it into a larger company listed on the New York Stock Exchange. His degrees are from Cornell University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Marcus Ranum is a world-renowned expert on security system design and implementation. Ranum is a pioneer in security technology who was one of the early innovators in firewall, VPN and intrusion detection systems. Since the late 1980s, he has designed a number of groundbreaking security products including the DEC SEAL, the TIS firewall toolkit, the Gauntlet firewall and NFR's Network Flight Recorder intrusion detection system. He has been involved in every level of operations of a security product business, from developer, to founder and CEO of NFR. In SC Magazine's 20th Anniversary Edition, Mr. Ranum was named as one of the top industry pioneers over the last 20 years.

Since joining Tenable Network Security in 2004, Mr. Ranum has been Chief Security Officer at Tenable, maker of the world renowned Nessus Vulnerability Scanner and Unified Security Monitoring enterprise solution. At Tenable, Mr. Ranum is responsible for research in logging tools, product training and product/best practice evangelism. In addition, Marcus is instrumental in the design of Tenable's Unified Security Monitoring enterprise solution. Prior to Tenable, Mr. Ranum had served as a consultant to many FORTUNE 500 firms and national governments, as well as serving as a guest lecturer and instructor at numerous high-tech conferences.

The Google and University of Maryland Cybersecurity Seminar Series is organized by the Maryland Cybersecurity Center, a multidisciplinary initiative at the University of Maryland advancing innovative research, education, and technology development in cybersecurity. The Google seminar series features diverse speakers from industry, academia, and government, addressing a broad range of topics related to cybersecurity, including technology, policy, and economics, placing special emphasis on “the human factor” of cybersecurity. For more information, please visit www.cyber.umd.edu/seminars.