One of the most notorious hackers of the ’90s and having been involved in the largest mass hack of all the time, this week, we speak to Greg van der Gaast.
Today, Greg is a leading voice on information security and takes an alternative humanistic approach to security solutions.
He has over two decades of technical, management, and leadership experience in the field. A passionate speaker on visibility, care, and accountability to the Information Security industry, he breaks our industry’s current reactive status quo.
This is a great 3rd edition of Interview with a CISO.
More business aligned and they will have more of a Business Leader role than the traditional security role we see today. The trend is already starting. Traditionally IT has had poor leadership. There is an opportunity to break away from that, in the same way many CIOs have become CEOs, because every business is now a tech business. CISO’s have this opportunity as well.
When you’re trying to manipulate systems to do something they’re not supposed to be doing, you have to look at the fine details – how things are actually built behind the scenes. As such, I have a desire to build things properly; and this includes company culture. Being one of the attackers, and by virtue of being surrounded by other attackers, made me realise how vital defence was, and now I scale that up to organisations.
The board doesn’t pay me to educate them; they pay me to solve a problem for them. And to solve that problem, I need to have their trust; it’s all about building that relationship.
I’d race cars all day, World Endurance Championship specifically.
I take a collective approach and work to applicants’ strengths rather than boxing someone to the confines of a job spec. My approach is flexible. I don’t follow a cookie-cutter approach; why lose out on a talented team member and not utilise important traits and skills because they didn’t meet a rigid job spec? We are a team, and we complement each other.
Hackers – Angelina Jolie