Firewall innovator Marcus J. Ranum to keynote Irish cybercrime conference

30 Aug 2012

Marcus J. Ranum, who built the first internet email server for the Whitehouse.gov domain and has a host of innovations in firewall and intrusion detection technology to his name, is to give the keynote address at this year’s Cyber Crime Conference in Dublin.

Now in its fourth year, the event is organised by IRISSCERT, the non-profit group that acts as an informal computer emergency response team for Ireland. It will be held in its regular venue of the D4 Berkeley Hotel in Dublin on Thursday 22 November.

Ranum follows last year’s excellent keynote from the antivirus veteran, Mikko Hypponen of F-Secure. Ranum is currently chief security officer at Tenable Security Inc. In 1990, while at Digital, he developed the Secure External Access Link which later became the first commercial firewall, the Altavista Firewall.

The New Yorker has remained prominent in security over his career and is a regular on the speaking circuit and an acknolwdged expert on security systems design. He recently converted a talk on ‘parsing cyberwar’ from this year’s RSA conference into an article that can be found at http://fabiusmaximus.com/2012/08/09/41557/.

Other speakers lined up for the event include Michael Moran, an Irishman who works for Interpol as a coordinator for its Crimes against Children unit, and Rik Ferguson, director of Trend Micro’s EMEA Security Research team.

Symantec, which like Trend Micro runs one of its global anti-malware teams out of its Irish operations, has two speakers scheduled to appear: Gavin O’Gorman and Candid Wueest. More details of each speaker and their topic is available at https://www.iriss.ie/iriss/irisscon.htm

Gordon Smith was a contributor to Silicon Republic

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