Our Founder: Randy Franklin Smith

Randy Franklin Smith, publisher of UltimateItSecurity.com, formerly known as UltimateWindowsSecurity.com, has spent a major part of his career analyzing security logs. After writing an article for Windows NT magazine on the Windows security log which received enormous attention, he began a multiple-year research project to plumb the depth and breadth of Windows auditing which had never been documented. Randy has provided training to help organizations - even Microsoft – understand and interpret security log events. Various SIEM vendors and end-users have licensed his Rosetta Audit Logging Kit for the prescriptive guidance and compliance mappings it provides for auditing Windows.

His free, online Security Log Encyclopedia remains the go-to place for tens of thousands of security analysts looking for up-to-date information on the cryptic Windows Security Log. And with The Windows Security Log Revealed, Randy literally “wrote the book” on the subject.

When SharePoint 2007 gained a new audit log capability, Randy intended to replicate the work he’d done on the Windows security log for SharePoint so that security operations centers could make sense of the events they would begin receiving in their SIEMs. But he quickly discovered the gap between the SharePoint audit log and log management/SIEM solutions. This quickly expanded to lead to the realization that the same gap exists with many other applications. This has created a blind spot in security operations centers today at the most critical layer – the application. After all, information security is about protecting information and your information is in applications. Hence the need for application security intelligence.

Having started out as a software developer this discovery brought him full circle leading to the formation of LOGbinder in 2008. Today LOGbinder is used by hundreds of organizations and has formed partnerships with the top players in SIEM and BDSA. Randy remains deeply involved with LOGbinder design, development, roadmap and evangelism.