by Sheryl Nance-Nash
Paul Judge is the kind of guy who looks for problems to solve. He has his hands full doing his part to keep the world of computing safe as an internationally recognized authority on information security issues. Simply and humbly, Judge says he “takes on the bad guys.”
There’s no shortage of foes. “There is a set of attackers that are pretty good at what they do. They are well funded, with hundreds of millions of dollars,” he said. “They are highly skilled, and some are supported by governments. We are in a challenging arms race between good and bad. This fact keeps me going. I know I can’t take a vacation for two years because they are relentless.”
Judge is chief research officer and vice president of Barracuda Networks, which last year acquired Purewire, a leading Web security-as-a-service company that Judge founded in 2007. Barracuda Networks combines premise-based gateways and software, cloud services, and sophisticated remote support to deliver comprehensive security, networking and storage solutions. The company’s product portfolio includes offerings for protection against email, Web and IM threats, as well as products that improve application delivery and network access, message archiving, backup and data protection.
Before Purewire, Judge was chief technology officer and senior vice president at Secure Computing, where he led the technology and product strategy. In 2000, he joined the founding team of CipherTrust which became one of the fastest growing companies in North America with 300 employees and over 3000 customers in 50 countries, including half of the Fortune 500. CipherTrust was acquired by Secure Computing for $273 million in 2006. While at CipherTrust and Secure Computing, he headed the technology strategy and spent time leading research, engineering and product management. He is an inventor of about 30 patented and patent-pending computer security technologies. He also worked briefly at IBM and NASA.
Judge, author of numerous papers published in academic journals and a presenter at industry and academic conferences around the world, has won numerous awards including InfoWorld Top 25 CTOs, Atlanta Power 30 under 30, and MIT Technology Review Magazine’s 100 Top Innovators under 35. He has also spearheaded multiple research initiatives and founded the Internet Research Task Force’s Anti-Spam Research Group.
At 33, Judge has accomplished much. He remembers clearly his early fascination with computer games in high school and programming. Originally, he thought he would pursue a career as a chemical engineer, but by the time he got to college he was captivated by the internet and e-commerce. “I saw that there was going to be so much money spent on the net. The big question was how to keep that money safe?” said Judge, who got his B.S in Computer Science from Morehouse and received his Ph.D. and M.S. in Network Security from Georgia Tech.
