Cyber Security: Protecting the Family Jewels

On this episode of Not Your Father’s Data Center, a Compass Datacenters Podcast, Host Raymond Hawkins talked with Amit Serper, Vice President of Security Research for North America of Guardicore, the segmentation company disrupting the legacy firewall market, whose software-only approach is decoupled from the physical network, providing a faster alternative to firewalls.

While most teenagers were busy worrying about the school dance or making a sports team, Serper was preoccupied with selling security and internet services out of his childhood bedroom. In the early 2000s, cable internet had been rolling out in Israel, and he lucked out as part of the beta test. The company installed an uncapped cable connection in his house, so he had high-speed internet.

Eventually, the cable company slowed down his connection; however, he hacked the system and returned it to its faster speed. This is also around the time he started to do things on a computer besides gaming. He had three computers in his bedroom and built three servers with multiple operating systems. He then began selling web hosting packages that ran on the servers. The name of his first business? Evil Cheese.

“I had this service running for two or three years,” Serper said. “At one point, my parents started getting weird calls from the cable company telling them ‘there’s very high upload usage and asking if there’s anything that the cable company should know about.’”

His parents didn’t have any idea what was going on, and Serper played dumb. Eventually, the cable company slowed his speed, and he had to close shop, but his passion for computers launched his career.

Starting at this ripe age and around the dot com boom, Serper became a hacker and reverse engineer. He joined the Israeli Intelligence Community at 18, where he worked on vulnerability research and exploit development to designing architectures of uniquely complicated, highly reliable, one-of-a-kind communication systems.