It's been an embarrassingly long time since we've recognized our great contributors to the CheckMates community! Time to get back to doing it.
Put your virtual hands together for @Jerry Szpinak, our CheckMates member of the Month for April 2019! When he's not doing consulting gigs around the UK or helping people here, you can also find him on Twitter and LinkedIn as well.
I was born in Gent (Belgium). My Mom was Polish and my Dad was Flemish (BE) and I have worked for IT companies since 1997. I graduated from Sociology at the University of Warsaw (Poland) due to the fact that when I was 7, my parents moved to Poland. Since I graduated in Poland I have flipped over the switch and started to learn Networking. Firstly it was just Cisco, but later my passion move towards network security, primarily attracted by FireWall-1 3.0 and obviously Provider-1. I have worked for more than 15 years for Security projects and consult for couple of companies, including UK GOV, L3 as well as 2 Professional Services organizations (PA/Juniper). My passion for network security started with Check Point and I believe it will remain like that unless R&D will screw R80.30 badly with API.
Started on FireWall-1 on SPLAT and IPSO. When GAIA came to the game, I fell in love as it has combined IPSO and SPLAT functionalities all-in-one giving us beloved VRRP and BGP 😝
I work with Check Point products every day as well as with Check Point Professional Services guys like Daniel Lavi (IL) and Daniel Scerberros (UK). We’ve done amazing things together ☺ usually big clients hire a lad like me for big bucks but this is another story.
I’ve got my own clusters on VSX at home running on 4800 and 5600 appliances, also CloudGuard IaaS on VMWare VMs, etc., the usual stuff for nerds like us. Plus I do appreciate perpetual licensing thanks for couple of my recent clients as well as hoping that Dameon finally give me some (believe me or not) deserved one as promised here some weeks ago. 😝
Editors Note: We're still working on re-instating the CheckMates Pro program. Stay tuned.
Know-How, sharing, helping others to improve their Check Point skills, as well as collaborating if I know something someone does not. Simple.
I really love you guys and you do outstanding work making this forum so well maintained. Also I’m one of the big fans of Mr. @PhoneBoy as I know his history with Check Point quite well. The Internet is a really powerful tool you know? 😝
I do have quite a few. I play tennis at the local level in UK, I do love cars and have my own monster from Germany 😝 @HeikoAnkenbrand may object, but yes – it is an AMG V8 610BHP/770nnm from Sep 2018 ☺ so believe or not I’m not a lazy man during my free time. I do have 18 year old daughter, so my time is really very very different every week. I love traveling and spending my time with my kiddo. Also with my better half, but she’s too busy to care about it much. 😝
I’d create more powerful DDoS platform from Check Point in order to compete with Arbor Network SP PeakFlow 😝. I know Arbor very well as I used to head a SOC for one of the UK’s biggest ISPs. I believe Check Point should get more into the DDoS Volumetric space, not only amplification and scrubbing.
I love you all and keep up an excellent work chaps! Please don’t forget that you don’t need to have 1000s of “kudos” to be a good Check Point SE 😝
