Smith is currently Akamai's security evangelist and helps customers understand both the internal security program and Akamai's product-security features. He believes his time in Afghanistan served as great training for his current infosec career.
"There's lots of relation to risk management. It was about understanding the threat: What the threat is doing, how it's changing and how you need to change what you are doing based on that," Smith says.
Smith shares some of the details of his time in Afghanistan, where he woke up each day knowing that danger--and even death--could be waiting around any corner.