The Jets are flying high these days and their player alumni are as excited as the New York fans about the team’s early 4-2 winning record.
Mark Gunn, who was the Jets fourth round pick in the 1991 Draft, is following his former team’s fortunes long distance from his home in San Antonio. Gunn played defensive tackle in New York for five seasons (1991-94, 1996) but now his current occupation is quite different from his playing days.
Gunn is a cyber security engineer at Alamo City Engineering Services (ACES). The software company has an impressive—and powerful—list of clients.
“We do a lot of cybersecurity protection for government entities such as the CDC,” Gunn recently told Jim Gehman of NYJets.com. “We protect their networks.”
ACES also has developed a new technology called containerization that Gunn believes may eventually help the Jets and other teams around the league.
“When you normally send an email,“ the 54-year-old Gunn explains “it leaves a footprint. There’s a record that I sent it on my end, and you received it on your end. You could delete the email but it still ‘artifacts’ so that it will say I sent you that email. With this new software, lets take the same email and before you send it, you put it inside this container.
“When you send that email inside the container, you can give it certain ‘permissions’. You can say you can read this email only. You can’t edit it. You can’t delete it etc. The only thing you can do is look at it. You can even put a time limit on it to make it dissipate at a certain time.
“Think about how this could be used in football. You have coaches in the press box communicating with the sidelines. You see quarterbacks on the bench with tablets…they’re sending plays and screen shots wirelessly. What teams don’t know is when that stuff is sent wirelessly, it really is vulnerable.
“So, if you send plays and other information inside of a container from the press box to the sideline, it’s completely airtight. No one can penetrate it under any circumstances unless you give them specific permission to do so.”
Our sport keeps getting more sophisticated each season so software such as this might very well be closer to use in the NFL than we think.
We at NFL Alumni appreciate what Mark Gunn has accomplished since his playing days ended. His cyber security work is one more example of the type of trailblazing careers you alumni are enjoying. We salute you!!
