And the award goes to…

I am a network security enthusiast at heart, so it was an unbelievable honor when Sourcefire, a leader in security software, selected me from hundreds of applicants to receive one of their two annual Snort Scholarships! My work for OSU’s Network Engineering Team to monitor and secure the campus network helped me to better understand network security in a very hands-on way and this recognition is just great.

Sourcefire develops the Snort “Intrusion Detection System” or IDS. An IDS listens for anomalies on the network. Since so much of people’s communication (websites, email, messaging) has very specific patterns, deviations from this can be a useful indicator of Bad Things (TM). Through understanding of the network and configuring the software to it, Snort is helping OSU (and soon the OSL!) to stay one step ahead.