On The Internet, Nobody Knows If You’re A Dog

Today on the show we welcome with Christian Folini of ModSecurity. Christian is the author of The Modsecurity Handbook (2nd edition) and Co-Lead of the OWASP ModSecurity Core Rule Set project. He is also the program chair of the Swiss Cyber Storm conference, Vice-President of Swiss Cyber Experts and a partner and consultant at netnea.com. In this episode, we discuss Christian’s interesting path from PhD in Medieval History to becoming an expert in computer science. He also shares his fascinating work with the Swiss voting system and how E-voting is alive and happening in that country today. Will a system like this ever be possible in the US? We get into that too. We also get into some interesting discussions drawing parallels between Medieval social history and the what is happening with the internet today, in terms of open source technology. He also explains (in a way your grandparents will even understand) how a firewall works, whitelisting, blacklisting, IP addresses and malicious and non-malicious traffic. We also hear more about his strategies for reverse proxy and stopping D-DOS. A background in humanities has really served Christian well in the art of explanation, making this episode full of great imagery, good humor and information that even the dog next door might appreciate.