Trailblazer Dr. Alissa Abdullah

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.”