About Us

At Firewall Builder our mission is to simplify firewall management. Having spent years wrestling with firewall rules ourselves, we know what it's like to be up late trying to get the firewall working. That frustration, along with our passion for creating easy-to-use software, inspired the creation of Firewall Builder.

With over 10 years of development and a large open source user base, Firewall Builder has evolved from a tool used in small network environments to a trusted firewall management application relied on by organizations around the globe, large and small, to keep their critical firewall infrastructure running.

Firewall Builder’s platform-neutral approach is based on the core belief that your firewall rules, and the elements used in those rules, shouldn't have to be tied to a specific firewall platform.

Firewall Builder Highlights
• Over 30 years of combined experience in data networking and security techonologies
• Firewall Builder application used by thousands of users around the globe to manage production firewalls
• Founders regularly publish articles in industry magazines like Linux Journal
• Only open source firewall management application that supports Linux, BSD and Cisco firewalls
• Firewall Builder is included in many major Linux distributions including Ubuntu

Vadim Kurland

Vadim is the original founder and lead developer of the Firewall Builder project. He started the project in 2000 and continues to drive the technical direction and strategy for Firewall Builder.

Vadim has over 16 years of experience designing and managing networks. After joining Google in 2002, he spent seven years in the network tools team during the period of explosive early growth. While there he architected the automated data center failover technology for Google's production network.

Pre-Google, Vadim was a network engineer at WebMD, joining as part of the merger with Healtheon, where he ran the production network that supported the company's first customers.

Little-known fact: Vadim co-founded one of the first ISPs in Ukraine.

Mike Horn

Mike is the community manager of the Firewall Builder project. With over 15 years of experience in engineering, operations, and product management positions in the technology sector, Mike is focused on growing the Firewall Builder community while maintaining the fanatical level of support Firewall Builder is known for.

He has been a technical and strategic consultant to companies including Vyatta, an open source router company, he has designed and built multiple international Internet backbones, and was responsible for the Managed Security Services products at Level 3.

Little-known fact: Mike started his career performing penetration testing of DoD systems.