#003 – Lenny Zeltser: You Can Never Know Everything

Lenny Zeltser is a seasoned business and tech leader with extensive information security expertise. As a product portfolio owner at a Fortune 500 company, he delivers the financial success and expansion of his orgnization’s security services and SaaS products. He has also been a national lead of the security consulting practice at Savvis (acquired by CenturyLink), where he managed the US team of service professionals, aligning their expertise to the firm’s cloud solutions.

Lenny helps shape global infosec practices by teaching incident response and malware defenses at SANS Institute and by sharing knowledge through writing, public speaking and community projects. He has earned the prestigious GIAC Security Expert professional designation and developed the Linux toolkit REMnux, which is used by malware analysts throughout the world. Lenny is on the Board of Directors of SANS Technology Institute and on the Advisory Board of Minerva Labs.

Lenny’s approaches to business and technology are built upon his work experience, independent research, as well as a Computer Science degree from the University of Pennsylvania and an MBA degree from MIT Sloan. His expertise is strongest at the intersection of business, technology, and information security, and spans incident response, infosec cloud services and business strategy. To get a sense for Lenny’s thought process and knowledge areas, take a look at his blog.

In this interview we will discuss why he is passionate about security, stagnating in information security and going back to grad school, public speaking, who has inspired him, his personal challenge asking for advice, early failures in technology, why he developed REMnux to make malware analysis accessible to as many people as possible, cloud security, writing better job descriptions, refining communication skills to technical and non-technical audiences, how to use certifications as a signaling mechanism, building industry relationships, and much more.

I hope you enjoy this discussion. Please leave your comments below!

Where you can find Lenny:

• LinkedIn
• Twitter
• Lenny’s Blog
• REMnux