Hello, welcome to the Friday, November 12, 2021 edition of the Sands and its Storm Center's

Stormcast. My name is Johannes Ulrich, and the time recording from Jacksonville, Florida.

Today's podcast will be different from what I usually do. I'm sad to report, but earlier this week, Alan Poller, the founder of the Sands Institute,

passed away without Alan.

There wouldn't be a podcast.

That wouldn't be the Internet Storm Center.

And my career probably would have turned out very different.

So there isn't really any patch or other event that I can talk about today

that would be important enough to not really dedicate this podcast to Alan and to talk a little bit

about Alan instead. I met Alan first in 2001. I just started DeShield.org, and he was an early supporter of that effort.

I ran it as a hobby.

He provided some funding, bought me some servers and such, to actually run it all until I then started working for Sands.

And one special thing about Alan is that probably many of you don't know him or may not even

have heard his name before, but he affected cybersecurity education like probably

hardly anybody else.

Affecting me personally, of course, in addition to starting the Sands Institute,

Allen also then founded the Sands Technology Institute, the graduate and undergraduate school that I am currently working for.

And one of the things that made him special was that he had all these connections and he

could call people.

And if he would receive one of his phone calls, he was always excited about a new way to get

people involved in cybersecurity, to improve some educational initiative. It was never about him. It was about

how to get the community to move forward and how to advance what we are doing. He also had a very

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