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Mastercard Acquires RiskRecon
RiskRecon Logo
I’m pleased to announce that Mastercard has entered into an agreement to purchase RiskRecon
There’s been no secret that Mastercard has a very low opinion of cybercrime, and a belief that the massive success of “commodity cybercrime” could be somewhat mitigated if everyone had better knowledge of the cybersecurity flaws in their own environments, and also those of third parties they are deeply connected to.
Many well known cyber attacks – British Airways, Target etc were due to flaws in third-party environments, but it’s the flagship companies who are held responsible and have to “pay the price”.
RiskRecon helps people understand their first and third party risk, and provides a prioritized list of recommendations based on an AI-driven determination of the potential value of the asset in question. A severe bug on a website which only delivers static content is obviously not as critical as one on a site which has a shopping cart, or has an authentication page leading to HR information – so representing them at equal priority is not useful. RiskRecon knows the difference and helps people understand what to pay attention to first.
I am delighted to welcome Kelly White and his Riskrecon team into my group – Kelly was one of my first USA Banking customers for SafeBoot, and always treated me with respect, even though I was his “vendor” – I hope I can repay the loyalty and respect he showed me then by helping RiskRecon reach the success they deserve under Mastercard.
I’m joining Mastercard
I’m pleased to announce that Mastercard has offered me the opportunity to take the next step in my cybersecurity career – joining them in the fight to block criminals from making money from cybercrime.
Mastercard has an amazing reach across the globe – tens of millions of merchants, thousands of banks and billions of cardholders look to them to make sure cashless payments are made securely, and of course, criminals look for weaknesses and ways to exploit the global economy to make money.
Given around $600 billion of the $1.5 trillion dollars generated by cybercrime is used to further criminal activity – solving this is a problem I am beyond passionate about. Having spent the last 20 years in cybersecurity “protecting secrets”, getting closer to the problem of criminal funding is very exciting.
My new role merges standards, fraud intelligence, and cybersecurity – and I am also excited to be taking on responsibility for the infamous Mastercard DigiSec Lab.
game on!
Speaking at INTX 2015, Chicago May 5-7
This week I’ll be at INTX Chicago talking to ISPs and cable providers about our secure gateway technology – if you’re attending please drop into the Intel booth and say hello!
Speaking at CES 6-9 Jan Las Vegas
This week I’ll be working the Intel booth at CES 2015 talking about how we secure smart homes – if you’re attending please drop by and say hello.
My group is not in the main hall – we’re reserving the main Intel booth for the latest generation of tablets and laptops. I’ll be in our dedicated Service Providers Division booth in the Raddison hotel just across the street.
The Connected Home – Introducing the McAfee Little Red Box
This will be old news to those of you who took the time to visit McAfee Focus 2012 , but for the rest – my team took the opportunity to introduce the concept of the McAfee “Little Red Box” in the Innovation roadshow.
It’s a prototype project that my team has been working on for some time now, and will go some way to answer the need to protect all the connected devices in your home.
My house is the classic connected home – I have the usual assortment of PCs and laptops that build up over the years, some relegated to the role of photo frame, others scattered around for occasional browsing and email use. There’s also the odd real photo frame (wirelessly connected to a media server of course), and on that topic, numerous Playstations, XBoxs, and other gaming consoles that my family enjoy.
If that wasn’t enough IP connected equipment, you can add into the mix more than one of every Apple device made – iPads, iPhones, Apple TV’s, even an Apple Mini, oh and a few Samsung internet connected TV’s as well.
I often jest that I have an internet-toaster, but I don’t. My wife thought about buying an internet-fridge, but the fact it didn’t support wireless put her off.
I must be forgetting something, as my router DNS server regularly gets maxed out – oh yes, I have Sonos throughout the house as well, and also a few Apple Airport Express wireless repeaters.
You don’t come to my place if you’re sensitive to EMF… Read more…
Speaking at Evanta CISO, Los Angeles on 14th May 2012
May 14, 2012 – Omni Los Angeles Hotel at California Plaza
Just a warning that I’ll be speaking at the CISO Summit on the 14th in LA – “Securing The Unsecurable” will be the topic. I look forward to seeing you there, and the usual rules apply – I’ll swap vanity short URLs on the http://mcaf.ee service for good jokes!
ISACA Orlando Event – thanks to those who attended…
The world’s leading audit conference for IT audit, security, governance and risk professionals
I just wanted to take a brief moment to thank all those who came and spoke to me after the ISACA presentation yesterday on “Securing The Unsecurable”. It’s great to hear that the direction I, McAfee, and our partner Accuvant are taking is indeed synergistic with our customers.
For those interesting, I uploaded a copy of the presentation to my companion site – CTOWild. You can find it under the title “2012-05 ISCAC.pdf” – You may be able to see it using this Direct Link.
Thanks again to the 100+ people who attended my session, and I hope you found it valuable and not too dull, even though I overran my time slot outrageously.
Simon.
Speaking at ASIS International Orlando, 20th September
For those in the Orlando area, you’ll find me presenting at ASIS International on the 20th – I’m talking about mobile security and consumerization, a topic close to most IT leaders hearts.
If you’re going to be there, please say hello, and of course my standing offer of a vanity http://mcaf.ee url in exchange for a good joke still holds.
Underground Economies – The rise of Intellectual Capital Theft.
By now I hope readers have seen the latest latest report from McAfee that I was involved in – “Underground Economies” where McAfee and SAIC collaborated to investigate perceptions around intellectual capital – the “secret sauce” of companies. The report surveyed over 1,000 senior IT decision makers across the world, getting their opinion on where they thought their valuable data was, their attitude to outsourcing control of it, and questions around how it was protected and the risk of it being “misplaced”.
You can read more from the actual report, or see my corporate blog. There’s been a lot of press on this report, such as
Improving Security On Solid State Drives
This post originally placed on my McAfee Blog – http://blogs.mcafee.com/corporate/cto/improving-security-on-solid-state-drives
Well, One week into the Intel/McAfee relationship and I am pleased to say it’s already bearing fruit. Over the last few days I’ve been reaching out to all my Intel peers, making the connections with people which were simply impossible while the deal was going through all the evaluations.
I had an interesting discussion with Knut Grimsrud in the Intel storage division today about “clever” things we can do to improve performance and security on the Intel SSD hard disks. Read more…
Who?
 | EVP Cyber Product Innovation for Mastercard. Formally the Chief Technology Officer for Intel Secure Home Gateways, CTO for McAfee Enterprise Endpoint, CTO McAfee Innovation team, and Founder/CTO SafeBoot Corp. |
Simon Says - Musings of a Technology CTO 
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