Vision Statement

GTISC IndustRY Advisory Board

The Georgia Tech Information Security Center (GTISC) has created a 22-member board of industry advisors to give GTISC advice and strategy as it grows as an academic research organization in information security.

GTISC's board of advisors features security and technology executives from top organizations in the IT industry and the global business community:

 

Dmitri Alperovitch, Vice President, Threat Research, McAfee

Dmitri Alperovitch leads McAfee’s Internet threat intelligence analysis, correlation, and visualization, as well as the development of real-time, in-the-cloud Global Threat Intelligence services, such as TrustedSource and SiteAdvisor.

With more than a decade of experience in the field of information security, Alperovitch is a leading inventor of numerous patented and patent-pending technologies and has conducted extensive research on reputation systems, spam detection, public-key and identity-based cryptography, and network intrusion detection and prevention.

As a recognized authority on online organized criminal activity, cyber warfare, and cybersecurity, Alperovitch has significant experience working as a subject matter expert with all levels of U.S. and international law enforcement on analysis, investigations, and profiling of transnational organized criminal activities and cyberthreats from terrorist and nation-state adversaries. He is frequently quoted as an expert source in national publications, including The Associated Press, NBC, The New York Times, USA Today, and The Washington Post.

Prior to joining McAfee, Alperovitch led the research team and the software-as-a-service business at Secure Computing. He is a frequent speaker and panelist at law enforcement, academic, and leading security industry conferences.

Alperovitch holds a master’s degree in information security and a bachelor’s degree in computer science, both from Georgia Institute of Technology.

David Aucsmith, Senior Director, Microsoft's Institute for Advanced Technology in Governments

David Aucsmith is the Senior Director of Microsoft's Institute for Advanced Technology in Governments. He is responsible for technical relationships with United States Government agencies, as well as on select special projects.

Before joining Microsoft in August 2002, Aucsmith was the chief security architect for Intel Corp. from 1994 to 2002. He has worked in a variety of security technology areas including secure computer systems, secure communications systems, random number generation, cryptography, steganography and network intrusion detection. Aucsmith is a former officer in the U.S. Navy and has been heavily involved in computer security and cybercrime issues for more than 20 years. He is an industry representative to numerous international, government and academic organizations. Currently he is a member of the advisory board of the National Security Agency, co-chairman of the FBI's Information Technology Study Group, a member of the Secret Service Task Force on Computer Aided Counterfeiting, member of the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board of the National Academes of Science, a member of the President's Task Force on National Defense and Computer Technology and a member of the Department of Defense's Global Information Grid Senior Industry Review Group. Aucsmith was also U.S. industry representative to the G8 Committee on Organized, Transnational, and Technological Crime where he participated directly in the G8 summits in Paris , Berlin and Tokyo . Previously he has worked with the European Commission DG XIII to craft digital signature regulations, representing the U.S. industry at the European Commission hearings on digital signatures.

Aucsmith holds 29 patents for digital security technology and is an editor for the IEE Journal of Information Security, a member of the advisory board for the College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and was featured in Time Magazine as a member of the magazine's technology board. Aucsmith holds a Bachelor of Science degree in biochemistry from the University of Georgia and Master of Science degrees in physics from the Naval Postgraduate School and information and computer sciences from the Georgia Institute of Technology respectively.

George W. Cox, Platform Security Architect, Intel Corporation 

Over George’s 35 year career at Intel, he has instigated and led a broad spectrum of technology/product programs ranging from systolic array supercomputers (iWarp – with CMU and DARPA) to his current work in advanced cryptographic circuits. George has a long history of research, advising, donation, and recruiting relationships with universities (e.g., with Georgia Tech, CMU, and Purdue). He brings his ~15 years of security technology/product experience to the GTISC Advisory Board.

Scott E. Hrastar, Ph.D., Senior Vice President of IP Services, Internap

Scott is currently the Senior Vice President of IP Services at Internap and is a veteran executive and serial technology entrepreneur who has both founded and led a number of successful technology businesses.  He was a co-founder of  wireless security vendor AirDefense, and drove the company's innovative security solution, which ultimately led to its acquisition by Motorola.  He later was a member of the senior management team that drove the successful $435M acquisition of Intellisync by Nokia.  While at Nokia,  Scott focused on technology strategy and M&A, successfully acquiring two mobility companies valued at over $200M for Nokia during his tenure.  He is a recognized authority in both wired and wireless network security, with additional expertise in both enterprise and consumer mobility, internetworking and video transport. Scott is also an accomplished innovator and has authored thirty-two patents.

As CTO and co-founder of AirDefense, he led the development of the world’s first wireless intrusion detection and protection solution and helped to grow a business that reached more than 80% of the Fortune 100.  In recognition of this innovation, InfoWorld selected Scott as one of the world’s top 25 CTO’s in 2005.

Scott has been involved in several other successful startups and held executive vice president positions as a member of the founding management teams at both Pathfire and Internet security vendor Lancope. Prior to beginning his entrepreneurial career, Scott was a leading innovator at Scientific-Atlanta.  He was the Chief Architect responsible for developing the dataXcellerator cable modem product and also played a lead role in driving the company’s MPEG2 video delivery system. This effort led to successful commercial deployment and Scott being granted fourteen fundamental patents in the area of high-speed data communications.  Scott began his career at Hitachi Telecom, where he was a lead architect for the company’s video conferencing and telephony products.

Scott holds the B.S.E.E degree from the Ohio State University, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Dr. Paul Judge, Chief Research Officer and Vice President, Cloud Services, Barracuda Networks

Dr. Paul Q. Judge serves as chief research officer and VP cloud services at Barracuda Networks. There, he leads the Barracuda Labs threat intelligence team and is responsible for application security, Web threat, intrusion and anti-spam intelligence for over 100,000 appliances deployed worldwide. He was co-founder and CTO at Purewire, a Web security SaaS vendor acquired by Barracuda in October 2009. Previously he served as CTO of CipherTrust and Secure Computing. Dr. Judge is a recognized authority on Internet security, having won numerous honors including InfoWorld Top 25 CTOs, Atlanta Power 30 under 30 and MIT Technology Review Magazine's 100 Top Innovators under 35. He has been awarded 10 patents and has over 20 patents pending, and earned a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Georgia Tech.

Yousef Khalidi, Distinguished Engineer, Windows Azure

Yousef Khalidi is a Distinguished Engineer in the Windows Azure team. Windows Azure is a platform for developing, deploying, managing, and hosting cloud-based Web services. Khalidi is responsible for several aspects of the platform, centered on the goal of building a low-cost, automated, large-scale computing system, using commodity hardware, with efficiently managed shared resources. Before Windows Azure, Khalidi led an advanced development team in Windows that tackled a number of related operating system areas, including application model, resource management, and isolation. He also served as a member of the Windows Core Architecture group.

Before joining Microsoft, Khalidi was a Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems. During his 14 years tenure at Sun, he held several development, architecture, and management positions in Sun’s software division as well as in Sun Labs. Khalidi was Chief Technology Officer and Chief Architect of Solaris, Chief Architect and Director of the Sun Cluster product line, Chief Architect of Sun's N1 utility computing initiative, as well as a principal architect of Solaris MC and Spring operating systems. He shipped several releases of Sun Cluster and the Solaris operating system, and hasworked on system management software, high speed networking, and memory management hardware designs.

Khalidi has published works in several areas, including operating systems, high availability, distributed systems, object-oriented software, high speed networking, memory management, and computer architecture. He holds 30 patents in these areas. Khalidi has a Ph.D. and a Master of Science in Information and Computer Science from Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) in Atlanta, Georgia.

Sam Phillips, Vice President, Corporate Security, Research In Motion

As Vice President, Corporate Security at Research in Motion (RIM), Sam Phillips is responsible for the integrated security program supporting the corporate security needs of RIM, including physical and logical security.

Sam joined RIM in 2009. Prior to joining RIM, Sam worked with companies such as Bank of America, and The Boeing Company in roles ranging from IT Management to Senior Vice President of International Consulting focusing on IT Risk.

As Senior Vice President of Information Security at the Bank of America, Sam was responsible for enterprise-wide security architecture, policy and standards, and platform and produce security.

Sam hold a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science from Montana State University and a Master of Science degree in Information Systems Management from Seattle Pacific University.

David Pool, Vice President, VeriSign Labs, VeriSign Corporation

Dave Pool is the leader of VeriSign Labs. Over his eight plus years at VeriSign, he has held numerous technology leadership positions. Dave oversaw the software development of VeriSign’s ATLAS network services platform which included the migration of the DNS service for .com/.net to ATLAS while maintaining true 100% availability and processing over 15 billion lookups per day on average. He also has had oversight for VeriSign’s prepaid wireless billing service, infrastructure standards, production systems architecture, as well as, information security policy, compliance and operations. Dave established and led adoption of computing and architecture standards for VeriSign, with a focus on high availability, high performance, and total cost of ownership.

Prior to VeriSign, he served as the Chief Technology Officer and a principal innovator at Opion, Inc., and as Vice President of Engineering for Giving Capital LLC.

Education: Bachelor of Science, Applied Mathematics and Computer Science, Longwood College, Farmville, VA

Val Rahmani, Chief Executive Officer, Damballa

Val Rahmani brings over 25 years of customer-driven business and technical leadership to Damballa. Prior to Damballa, Val served as General Manager of IBM's Internet Security Systems (ISS) division after IBM's $1.3 billion acquisition of the company. At ISS, she was responsible for the strategic direction, growth and integration of all ISS products, services and research into IBM's overall security offerings. Prior to ISS, Val held several general management roles within IBM, including multi-billion dollar hardware, software and services businesses. Her IBM experience includes UNIX, mainframe, telco, utilities, global wireless and media markets in North America, Europe, the Middle East and Africa. She also ran a strategy unit, where she focused on emerging markets, global alliances and services business models. Val was born in the United Kingdom and first came to the United States as Executive Assistant to Lou Gerstner, soon after he became Chairman and CEO of IBM. Rahmani is an accomplished speaker, keynoting security industry events such the RSA conference in 2008. Val holds an MA and a Doctor of Philosophy from Oxford University in England, and is a member of the British aerobatics team.

Jon R. Ramsey, Chief Technology Officer, SecureWorks, Inc.

Jon Ramsey is an information security expert with policy-making responsibility at SecureWorks. Ramsey has 20 years of hands-on experience at every level: system administrator, software engineer, analyst, security penetration specialist and senior engineer. He currently oversees the Counter Threat UnitSM research team at SecureWorks, which collects, monitors and analyzes security threats. Prior to joining SecureWorks, Ramsey worked for the Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT), Siemens, and the University of Pittsburgh. Ramsey earned a Master’s degree in software engineering from Carnegie Mellon University and a BS in computer science from the University of Pittsburgh. He is a member of IEEE and the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).

J.R. Rao, Senior Manager, Secure Software and Services, IBM

J.R. Rao leads the Secure Software and Services Group at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center. The group works in the areas of Web Services Security, Language-based Security, Security for the Eclipse Platform, Systems and Network Security, Embedded Systems Security, Applied Cryptography and Side Channel Cryptanalysis.

JR is a member of the IFIP Working Group 2.3 (Programming Methodology) and is on the Steering Committee of the CHES Conference. He has published widely in a number of security conferences and holds numerous US and European patents. He was an Adjunct Professor at the Department of Computer Sciences, New York University in 1997.

JR has a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin, 1992 (Dissertation title: Building on the UNITY Experience: Compositionality, Fairness and Probability in Parallelism) and a M.S. in Computer Science from the State University of New York at Stony Brook, 1986 (Thesis title: Implementation Details of a Distributed, Multi-version, Optimistic Concurrency Control Algorithm) and a B.Tech. in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, 1984.

Christopher J. Rouland, Co-founder and CEO, Endgame Systems

As co-founder and CEO of Endgame Systems, Christopher J. Rouland brings exceptional depth and breadth of information security and leadership experience to the organization. He formerly served as Chief Technology Officer (CTO) for IBM Internet Security Systems and, while there, also received the preeminent designation of IBM Distinguished Engineer, an appointment reserved for leading technical professionals who exhibit exemplary innovation, leadership and intellect. Prior to the IBM acquisition of Internet Security Systems (ISS) in 2006, Rouland held the executive positions of CTO and vice president of X-Force Research and Development, a high-profile corporate cybercrime division. Rouland received a master’s degree in computer science from The Georgia Institute of Technology. He provides expert commentary on Internet security issues for media outlets such as CNN, FOX News and the Associated Press. Rouland also actively participates in numerous business and community organizations. He is member of the Business Executives for National Security and is an adjunct faculty member at Georgia Tech.

David Rowan, Senior Vice President and Director of Enterprise Technology Risk Management, SunTrust Banks, Inc.

David Rowan serves as Senior Vice President and Director of Enterprise Technology Risk Management (ETRM) for SunTrust Banks, Inc. David brings 28 years of experience in the financial services industry to his role. He is responsible for the Corporate Information Security Program, Technology Legal and Regulatory Assurance Program, Fraud Management Program, Access Management Program, Records Management Program, Physical Security Program, Client Data Assurance, Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Program.

David joined SunTrust in November 2000. Prior to joining SunTrust, David was Chief Information Officer for Prudential Bank and Trust from 1995 to 2000. David’s experience in the financial services industry focuses on technology and operations and includes positions held at Wells Fargo, Citi Bank and Crocker National. David attended the University of Nevada at Reno where he majored in accounting and economics. David serves on the MasterCard’s Risk Advisory Council, the Curriculum Advisory Board for the Information Security Program for the Georgia Institute of Technology and is a Board Member of the Identity Theft Assistance Center (ITAC) and is a member of the Information Systems Audit and Control Association.

Darren Shou, Director, Development, Symantec Research Labs

Darren Shou is a director of Collaborative Advanced Research Department, a division of Symantec Research Labs, responsible for collaborations between Symantec and external researchers to advance research, encourage innovation, and transfer technology in areas of Symantec's business interests. He is also responsible for Symantec’s Long-Term Technology Outlook.

Previously he served as manager of program management and product management with the Symantec Enterprise Security Group and was responsible for developing the enterprise OEM business and managing the response team.
Prior to joining Symantec, Shou was a program manager at Microsoft in the developer division working on Visual C++ and launching C# .Net. He holds a bachelor's degree in computer science and computer engineering from University of Southern California (USC).

Rob Smith, CEO/CTO, Mobile Application Development

Rob Smith, as the Chief Technology Officer of Mobile Application Development (M.A.D.) Partners LLC, brings over two decades of technology design, support and management experience to the company. He oversees daily operations of product design and development and sets the strategic direction of the company's technology and engineering endeavors.

In his most recent role, before founding M.A.D. Partners, Mr. Smith was the Chief Executive Officer of MSS Security Services GmbH, one of the largest managed security services firms in Europe. Prior to MSS, Mr. Smith was the CEO for SNC Secure Networking Company AG which was Germany's first dedicated managed services provider. While at SNC, Mr. Smith designed the industry's first Unified Threat Management (UTM) device to protect consumers and small business from viruses, SPAM, Phishing attacks, and malicious hacking from the Internet. From this invention, Mr. Smith currently holds 7 patents.

In June 1998, Mr. Smith came on board as a product manager of VeriSign, Inc. During his time at the company, Mr. Smith designed several industry-first applications including the first ever reporting and diagnostic tools for Check Point firewalls. He also designed Go Secure!, a program that enables secure communications over the Internet by creating a Virtual Private Network (VPN), for both Cisco Systems and Check Point. In addition, he worked on several large-scale projects for such organizations as European Bank, Coca-Cola, AT&T, First Union and NASA.

Tony Spinelli, Chief Security Officer, Corporate Security and Compliance, Equifax

Tony Spinelli is Senior Vice President, Chief Security Officer, Corporate Security and Compliance for Equifax, Inc. In this role, Mr. Spinelli oversees six global organizations to include Security Compliance & Risk, Security Operations, Physical Security, Security Engineering, Investigations and Fraud, and Ethics. He has responsibility for the global security, regulatory compliance, and risk posture for Equifax.

Prior to joining Equifax, Mr. Spinelli was Vice President, Chief Information Security Officer for First Data Commercial Services. Previous to First Data, he was a National Director at Ernst & Young's Security and Risk practice, where he was also a founder of eSecurityOnline, an Ernst & Young Ventures Company.

With deep industry expertise, Mr. Spinelli was honored to be appointed as a member of the Information Assurance Board of the Department of Defense. He also maintains an external presence on corporate advisory boards of leading information security companies and is a member of Consumer Credit Counseling Service’s Board of Directors.
His extensive knowledge of emerging trends in technology and the security industry has afforded him various honors, speaking, and research opportunities. Mr. Spinelli has been quoted by several top-tier media outlets, including Bloomberg, New York Times, Dow Jones, InformationWeek, Computerworld, Washington Post and Forbes.

Mr. Spinelli earned a BS in Finance from Saint Louis University, and received his MBA in the Executive Program at Washington University. He maintains CISSP accreditation.

David Thomas, Vice President of Managed Services & Security Consulting, Motorola

David Thomas is Vice President of Managed Services & Security Consulting for Motorola’s Enterprise Mobility Business. In this role, Thomas is responsible for the worldwide operation of managed services that operate and protect public safety systems and enterprise networks.

Thomas joined Motorola in September 2008 when Motorola acquired privately held AirDefense with headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia. As one of the initial employees of AirDefense, Thomas helped the company grow from a pre-revenue startup to a successful small technology company capable of addressing the needs of the largest Fortune 500 customers. Thomas was directly responsible for AirDefense’s product and corporate strategies. His commentary on wireless security has been featured on CNN and in the Wall Street Journal.

Prior to joining AirDefense, Thomas was the Director of Security Services for VeriSign. During his time with VeriSign, he was responsible for developing and deploying new security services to strengthen the defenses of VeriSign’s worldwide customer base. Before joining VeriSign, Thomas worked for the Department of Defense designing applications to assess the structural integrity of buildings and ran a systems integration consulting company.
Thomas became a Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) in 1999 and is also a Certified Information Systems Auditor (CISA).