Skip to main content

About

Joel Esler earned his stripes in intrusion analysis and incident response working for the U.S. Department of the Army. After earning a reputation for his work with Sourcefire’s Snort open source IDS, Sourcefire hired him in 2005 as a Senior Professional Services Consultant.

Esler quickly rose through the ranks at Sourcefire to become Senior Research Engineer for the Vulnerability Research Team (VRT) and Open Source Community Manager. In that dual role, he was responsible for threat detection created for the company’s Snort and ClamAV projects, as well as management of those open source projects.

In 2013, Esler joined Cisco following the company’s acquisition of Sourcefire. Today, as the Manager for Open Source, Web Development, Design, and Education for the Cisco Talos Group, Esler’s duties include brand management for Open Source and Talos, the Web Development Group, and Talos Education. He is also responsible for the Open Source projects that originated at Sourcefire and are now part of the Cisco security solutions portfolio, such as Snort, ClamAV, Razorback, and Daemonlogger.

As part of the leadership for Talos, Esler plays a central role in coordinating the work of and cooperation between team members, who contribute diverse areas of expertise to enhance Cisco security products and help protect customer networks. He attributes his ongoing commitment to a career in security to his passion for solving puzzles and the fact that he loves facing new challenges every day.

Esler is a regular contributor to the Cisco Security and Open Source Blogs: http://blogs.cisco.com/author/joelesler/, as well as the author and maintainer of the Snort and ClamAV blogs.

Previous roles
Prior to joining Sourcefire in 2005 as a Senior Professional Services Consultant, Esler was a contractor for Lockheed Martin. In that role, he worked for Lockheed Martin Information Technologies as a Senior Information Assurance Analyst and Computer Defense and Information Assurance Section Manager at the Regional Computer Emergency Response Team – South.

As a veteran of the U.S. Army, Esler served as a Multichannel Transmissions Supervisor for the U.S. Department of the Army.

More about Joel Esler …
For the past decade, Esler has been an advisor for the SANS certification process, specifically helping students to earn the Global Information Assurance Certification (GIAC) Gold Practical credential. He is responsible for grading students’ GIAC Gold Papers, which is the core requirement for Gold certification.

Additionally, Esler is a retired Senior Handler for the SANS Internet Storm Center, a global cooperative cyber threat/Internet security monitor and alert system.

Esler is also a co-author of the book, Snort® IDS and IPS Toolkit, published in 2007.
When he’s not tinkering with computers and technology, Esler enjoys working on his 1968 Ford Mustang and spending time with his wife and three children.


From June 2012 to June 2014, Esler served as Mayor and Councilman for the town of Townsend, DE.

Popular posts from this blog

Offset, Depth, Distance, and Within

Without going off the deep-end here and discussing every single Snort rule keyword, I just wanted to touch on a few modifiers that people sometimes misunderstand.  They aren't difficult, and hopefully after this explanation and a few examples, I can clear some of the air around these five modifiers.

The five modifiers that I am talking about are
OffsetDepthDistanceWithinnocaseThese five modifiers are not keywords of themselves, but rather they apply as modifiers to another keyword.  That keyword is "content". The content keyword is one of the easiest pieces of the Snort rules language as all it does is look for a particular string.  So for instance if I wanted to look for the word "joel" within a packet.  A simple:
content:"joel";Would allow me to do that.  The interesting part comes into play when you want to specify where inside of a particular packet you want the string "joel" to be looked for.  If you are running just a plain content ma…
18 comments
Read more

Writing Snort Rules Correctly

Let me start off by saying I'm not bashing the writer of this article, and I'm trying not to be super critical.  I don't want to discourage this person from writing articles about Snort rules.  It's great when people in the Snort community step up and explain some simple things out there.  There are mistakes, it comes with the territory.  If you choose to be one of the people that tries to write Snort rules, you also choose to be someone who wants to learn how to do it better.  That's why I write this blog post, not to bash the writer, but to teach.

I noticed this post today over at the "Tao of Signature Writing" blog, and to be honest I glanced over most of it figuring it was a rehash of things I've already read or things that have already been written from countless people about "Here's how you write Snort rules!".  I scrolled down quickly skimming, not reading at all really, and noticed this part:
Now, let us look at the second questio…
19 comments
Read more

Safari 5.1.4 now available

Safari 5.1.4 now available, fixes issues and improves performance | TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog:


Improve JavaScript performanceImprove responsiveness when typing into the search field after changing network configurations or with an intermittent network connectionAddress an issue that could cause webpages to flash white when switching between Safari windowsAddress issues that prevented printing U.S. Postal Service shipping labels and embedded PDFsPreserve links in PDFs saved from webpagesFix an issue that could make Flash content appear incomplete after using gesture zoomingFix an issue that could cause the screen to dim while watching HTML5 videoImprove stability, compatibility and startup time when using extensionsAllow cookies set during regular browsing to be available after using Private BrowsingFix an issue that could cause some data to be left behind after pressing the "Remove All Website Data" button
Post a Comment
Read more