TRAILBLAZER
Dr . Alissa Abdullah
PROTECTING MASTERCARD ’ S ASSETS
JOB TITLE : DEPUTY CSO COMPANY : MASTERCARD
When you have identities attached with metadata , it creates a lot of intelligence , a lot of intelligent data
Prior to Mastercard , Dr . Abdullah was the chief information security officer of Xerox where she established and led a corporate-wide information risk management programme . Dr . Abdullah also served as the deputy chief information officer of the White House where she helped modernise the Executive Office of the President ' s IT systems with cloud services and virtualisation .
Dr . Abdullah holds a PhD in Information Technology Management from Capella University , a master ’ s degree in Telecommunications and Computer Networks from The George Washington University and a bachelor ’ s degree in mathematics from Savannah State University .
Discussing her role she says : “ I share a tag team with our chief security officer Ron
Green . I am his deputy , and so what I am focused on is the emerging side .
“ I ' m really looking at what we want to do to fight the adversary of the future .
“ I think the adversary is going to show itself in a lot of different ways . We all are already looking at cloud , but I think the new side of the future is not really new , but how are we attacking identities when we have identities as part of the metadata ? I ' m not going to get too granular into this , but when you have identities attached with metadata , it creates a lot of intelligence , a lot of intelligent data .
“ I ' m really looking at identities and how we can make our identities easier . How can we build password lists ? How can we implement zero trust ? All of those things are things that we want to do in the right way so that we are being very proactive .”
18 March 2022