Appropriately paranoid enough “I get the psyche of the opponent,” says Jonathan John “Jon” Paz, information security officer of the third-largest bank in the Philippines. “I understand the thrill that hackers feel.” He recalls his university days as a chemistry/computer engineering major, when he pulled a prank on his friends. “I came up with a…
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An excellent place Some people get to where they are by treading a neat, straight, and predetermined path, but not Fannie Mae CISO Chris Porter. After training in pre-medicine and behavioral science, he joined a start-up, became an economist, manned an IT help desk, worked as an analyst and served as deputy CISO before landing…
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Talking from his office in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia’s cybersecurity chief Amirudin bin Abdul Wahab is upbeat about the state of his country’s cybersecurity preparedness. He has a lot to be proud of – a report from the International Telecommunication Union, which was adopted by the Economist Intelligence Unit, ranked Malaysia fourth worldwide in terms of…
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Lucking out “I wish I could tell you I planned it all, and that this was all thought through,” says Berin Lautenbach of his path from the start of his career to his present role as Asia Pacific CISO of Australian telco giant Telstra. But he did not plan to be where he now is.…
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When he gets some quiet time away from his job as head of cybersecurity for Asia Pacific at banking giant HSBC, David Gee does yoga. “Yoga is a metaphor for life,” he says, “…and for cybersecurity. We all have to develop core strength which includes flexibility and mindfulness.” Raised by a family that frequently threw…
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Rebecca Wynn has always had an affinity for education. She breezed through high school in two years and started college early, heading to Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. She initially entered a science program, but switched into the Art and Design Photography program to put her love of photography to work. After graduation, she did…
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These days it’s not uncommon for four-year-olds to tinker with computers, but in the 1970s, when Contra Costa County CISO Patrick Wilson was a four-year-old, access to a computer was a big deal. When it was a home computer in the form of a Commodore Serial Number 17, to be precise, it was unheard of.…
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Mohammed Noordin Yusuff Marican was a typical young boy in Singapore in the 1980s. He was always out playing football and hanging out with his friends. “I was never home.” But when he received his first computer at age 12 – a 486 – he embarked on a path that would eventually be his life’s…
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Peter Fizelle spent many years working in cybersecurity, starting in an intelligence agency, onto managed service providers, consulting and then various commercial banks, first in Australia, then Singapore and most recently in Hong Kong. “It was the financial services sector that had the money and the mindset to be early adopters of internet security,” he…
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It starts from the search Sometimes it’s the simplest things we happen to do that change the course of our lives. For Jason Witty, it is typing a four-letter word – “hack” – into a search engine bar that led him to a career, no, a life, in information security. That search turned up results…
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