Alumnus John McAdam’s company F5 Networks has become a business with a $1bn+ turnover by making applications fast, available and also secure, helping firms stay one step ahead of the hackers. This was first published in AlumniNews, Issue 131, February 2014. Find out more about our alumni community at http://www.london.edu/alumni

1. AlumniNews ISSUE 131
FEBRUARY 2014

2. ■TheBigIssue/Fighting the cyber hackers
THE WORDS ‘CYBER SECURITY’
MAY have a futuristic ring to them,
but they represent an issue that
has the potential to affect all of us
at home or on the move and at the
companies we work for – even
governments are defending their
borders on a new online front.
For John McAdam
SEP27(1990), President and CEO
of application delivery firm F5
Networks, the persistent and
constant innovation of the hackers,
phishers and online ne’er-do-wells
has helped turn F5 Networks from
a relatively small IT organisation
with a $109m turnover when he
joined in the burst-bubble phase of
the dotcom boom to a business
turning over well in excess of $1bn.
And, while much of this may be
attributable to his business
prowess, he attributes recent
growth – at least in part – to our
love of all things mobile.
“I have never seen such fast
change as I’ve seen in the past
couple of years,” he says. “Mobility
has changed everything and is a
real driver for our business.” And
while that’s good news for
businesses such as F5 Networks, it
means that more of our intellectual
property, personal, customer and
company data is at risk.
John defines cyber security in
the big sense as securing the
stability and integrity of the internet
and the “whole online
environment”. Things have moved
on from the rather amateurish
‘phishing’ attacks, where hackers
would put up bogus web shop-
fronts of banks or emails
requesting personal data. Now
there are legion and far more
coordinated forms of attack
featuring techniques like ‘denial of
service’ where servers are made to
flood a website with data,
effectively knocking it out.
“This is where you get an
organising, informal group of
people who want to disrupt a
business for whatever reason,” he
says. “Then there are attacks on
governments, and there are
examples of blackmail attacks,
where people from across the
It’s a digital jungle out there, and any company that gets
complacent about its cyber security is likely to pay a
heavy price. Alumnus John McAdam’s company F5
Networks has become a business with a $1bn+
turnover by making applications fast, available and also
secure, helping firms stay one step ahead of the
hackers. He talks to PHIL HEARD

3. ■TheBigIssue/Fighting the cyber hackers
world have got together and said
‘unless you meet our demands we
will bring your site down’.”
The advent of mobile internet
access combined with the ‘big
data’ phenomenon that sees
companies tracking and storing
information on customer behaviour
has multiplied the risks. “Big data
complicates things. The ability to
analyse vast data sets and draw
meaningful conclusions from them
means businesses know more
about customers than ever before,
especially in the online and retail
spaces,” says John.
The ethical balancing act
between privacy and security is
one for clients to mull over. Cyber
security gatekeepers are too busy
tackling the growth in mobility and
the constant proliferation of apps,
which are the most valuable target
for hackers. “Making apps secure
is a major challenge,” says John.
For many of us, internet security
may not extend beyond making
sure that our virus software is up to
date. But, as with flu jabs, these
updates tend to be made from out-
of-date material – or ‘signatures’ as
they’re known. And relying solely
on them is not enough. “A lot of
security is built on signatures, and
you need to make sure that they’re
all up to date, but the way you get
ahead is by using ‘policies’ – layers
of them,” says John.
These are the permissions that
grant access for certain users to
certain parts of a network or
specific applications. Similarly,
should an employee leave with a
personal mobile phone, for
example, company-specific data
can be identified and removed,
leaving their personal data intact.
“You may encounter a policy as
soon as you connect to a data
centre whether you’re on office
premises on a computer, or
connecting in from an internet café
on a mobile or a tablet,” says John.
“Your device, where you are and
other factors determine what you
can access.”
He advocates strongly the notion
of application ‘firewalls’, which
provide security and more policies
at an application level. Every
company will have a firewall to
protect their servers, but having a
walled garden filled with otherwise
“It’s a game that keeps on
going. You can never sit back
and think you’re secure
because the bad guys will think
of something”
JOHN McADAM SEP27(1990)

4. ■TheBigIssue/Fighting the cyber hackers
unprotected crops is just not
protection enough. “It’s a game
that keeps on going,” he says.
“You can never sit back and think
you’re secure because the bad
guys will think of something.”
And while every stage of the
journey can be encrypted, part of
the cyber security expert’s role is to
look for opportunities that hackers
might use, balancing that with
individual privacy. “You track what’s
happening, so you see logs of
things within an application and if
you see that someone was trying
something you weren’t expecting,
you might think that’s interesting –
and then you build in more
protection.”
The challenge seems to be
endless, but recognition of this is
now topping the agenda in
enlightened boardrooms. “If you go
back three to five years, there
wouldn’t have been the
awareness,” says John, no
stranger to most leading CIOs and
CEOs.
“I haven’t met anyone at board
level in a Fortune 500 company not
versed about the enterprise risk
that cyber security presents,” he
adds. “I can’t imagine a scenario in
which cyber security isn’t on the list
of risk-management issues to look
out for.”
And, as the online environment
continues to grow, John’s
company looks set to remain one
of Fortune magazine’s top tech
stocks to watch. ■