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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In a job interview just out of college in 1995, Angel Redoble was asked if he had any experience with computers. An engineer by training, Angel said he had none. Fortunately, the boss was a friend of his sister. She hired him as an allowance-based trainee at one of the first Internet service providers in…
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You might say that John Whiting is a self-made Chief Security Officer. He didn’t start out to pursue any sort of information security career, or even an IT career. Whiting went to John Jay College, part of City University of New York, for a pre-law program. He graduated with a degree in Legal Studies. During…
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Mark Eggleston says his entry into the CISO realm is a little more atypical than that of others. “I didn’t necessarily come from the network group. I didn’t necessarily come up from IT. I kind of came up from compliance. I tell people I’ve had three careers and this current career is the keeper,” he…
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Seth McCallister, Chief Information Security Officer, HUB International Protecting information assets for a Fortune 500 company and managing a farm may not appear to have much in common, unless you’re viewing both through the eyes of insurance company CISO Seth McCallister. Both are macro organizational systems with micro components, he says. And the organizational work…
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Vanessa Pegueros, Vice President and Chief Information Security Officer, DocuSign Vanessa Pegueros calls herself an “education nut.” She loves learning in all its aspects. “I’ve always loved math and science from the very beginning of when I was young. I was one of those weird kids that used to read Scientific America in grammar school.…
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Tellis Williams, Chief Information Security Officer, AXA Assistance There are two things in Tellis Williams’ background that primed him to become a detail-oriented Chief Information Security Officer. First of all, he has a degree in the broad but disciplined field of electrical engineering. And second, he’s been a musician since the age of four. Williams…
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