Alan Paller is founder and research director of the SANS Institute, a graduate degree granting college and security training and research institution with more than 120,000 alumni in seventy countries. At SANS, 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 also oversees the Internet Storm Center (an early warning system for the Internet), NewsBites, (the semi-weekly security news summaries that go to 210,000 people), (the authoritative summary of all critical new vulnerabilities discovered each week), and the identification of the most damaging new attacks being discovered each year.

He has testified 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. The Office of Management and Budget and the Federal CIO Council named Alan as their 2005 Azimuth Award winner, a singular lifetime achievement award recognizing outstanding service of a non-government person to improving federal information technology. In May of 2010, the Washington Post named seven people as “worth knowing, or knowing about” in cyber security. The list included General Alexander who heads the US Cyber Command, Howard Schmidt, the White House Cyber Coordinator, other national leaders, and Alan.

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 and MIT.