2017 AFCEA Defensive Cyber Operations Symposium

Alan Paller
Director of Research
SANS Institute


Alan Paller founded SANS, a professional cybersecurity training school that trains more than 48,000 cybersecurity technologists each year. He is also president of SANS Technology Institute, the nation’s first regionally accredited cybersecurity-only college and graduate school. Alan oversees a global program that identifies and celebrates people responsible for remarkable improvement in cyber risk reduction and chairs the annual RSA keynote panel on the “Five Most Dangerous New Attack Vectors." He has testified before the US Senate and House of Representatives and was an initial member of the President’s National Infrastructure Assurance Council. He was chosen by OMB and the Federal CIO Council as the 2005 Azimuth Award winner, a lifetime achievement award recognizing outstanding service of a single, non-government person to improving federal information technology. In 2010, the Washington Post named him one of seven people “worth knowing in cyber security.” Alan co-chaired the DHS Homeland Security Advisory Committee’s 2012 Task Force on Cyber Skills and headed the Task Force on Best Practices in Cybersecurity for the FCC Communications Security, Reliability and Interoperability Council. Earlier in his career Alan helped build one of the first large software companies, took it public, and merged it into a larger company listed on the New York Stock Exchange. He earned degrees in Engineering and Computer Science from Cornell University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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