Ibrahima Mbaye sets aside time in his busy schedule to have coffee, lunch or dinner with young cybersecurity graduates and college students. Mentoring young graduates and students entering the profession is his way of giving back to an industry that gave him enormous opportunities after he migrated to the United States from his native Senegal. “I…
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After almost 20 years working for IBM in various IT roles and working under bosses of different temperaments, Wes Knight was perfectly happy to run his own training and consultancy firm in Atlanta, Georgia. “In my company, pretty much I was the company, the sole revenue generator,” he says. He worked long hours, travelled more days than…
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Clifford Stokes Jr., Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) of Florida A&M University, has his cybersecurity strategy all mapped out. He sits down with his supervisor and produces a three-year plan, a two-year plan, a one-year plan. And then he takes the strategy and breaks it down into components and targets. He plans his day equally…
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Imagine someone running while juggling many different things, hoping he doesn’t drop anything. Serco’s Garrett Smiley says this would be an accurate description of the demands on a CISO. The job has taught him that achieving perfection is next to impossible. “There is always more work than there are people doing work, and the work…
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In a way, it was music that led Kevin Morrison, the CISO of home construction firm PulteGroup, to a career in information security. “I was always musically inclined,” he says. “My parents were both musicians, while my older brother played trombone, and my younger brother played saxophone. There was always music around the house.” Morrison…
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On his first day as a CISO for financial giant American Express, Jim Routh learned a valuable lesson on the kindness of strangers. He looked at his calendar and saw that he was due to present a security strategy the following day to the Office of the Controller of the Currency. He felt ill-prepared.…
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Patricia Titus Chief Privacy and Information Security Officer Markel Corporation Author B.J. Neblett once wrote, “We are the sum total of our experiences. Those experiences – be they positive or negative – make us the person we are, at any given point in our lives. And, like a flowing river, those same experiences, and…
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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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