Ron Gula Podcast

I finally got a chance to listen to a new podcast with Ron Gula. Sondra Schneider from Security University interviewed Ron. The podcast lasts about 26 minutes and discusses Ron's experience as a NSA red team aggressor and his work at BBN.

I specifically liked Ron's discussion of the difference between access control and monitoring. He said making a firewall change affects customer service level agreements; hence, firewalls were part of operations as they had direct impact on moving packets. Monitoring was typically not an operational function, because it was passive and was not access control. Ron said IPSs need to be treated as part of operations (they are a firewall, after all) because they block traffic.

Ron also pointed out confusion between credit card theft and identity theft. Some people consider the two events to be the same. This is not the case, since recovering from a stolen credit card is much easier.

Here is Ron's bio, for those of you not familiar with him.

Ron Gula - President and Chief Technical Officer, Tenable Network Security

Mr. Gula was the original author of the Dragon IDS and CTO of Network Security Wizards which was acquired by Enterasys Networks. At Enterasys, Mr. Gula was Vice President of IDS Products and worked with many top financial, government, security service providers and commercial companies to help deploy and monitor large IDS installations. Mr. Gula was also the Director of Risk Mitigation for US Internetworking and was responsible for intrusion detection and vulnerability detection for one of the first application service providers. Mr. Gula worked for BBN and GTE Internetworking where he conducted security assessments as a consultant, helped to develop one of the first commercial network honeypots and helped develop security policies for large carrier-class networks. Mr. Gula began his career in information security while working at the National Security Agency conducting penetration tests of government networks and performing advanced vulnerability research. Mr. Gula has a BS from Clarkson University and a MSEE from University of Southern Illinois. Ron Gula was the recipient of the 2004 Techno Security Conference "Industry Professional of the Year" award.