I’ve been in financial services for more than 20 years, and in that time, I have been fortunate enough to experience a variety of interesting jobs, from directing large change programmes, launching new products/ services to managing process re-engineering consultancy teams. I am currently head of payment security at Barclaycard, where I oversee the security compliance of about 100,000 B2B customers. For me, getting into information security happened by chance rather than design and it has been my hobby horse for a while to try and demystify information security and promote safer practices! When we think that the single biggest problem we face is the lack of security education and awareness at all levels, this endeavour is relentless…
What I talk about…
I only started blogging at the end of January 2012 so I’m very new to it, but I am delighted with the attention my posts are getting. I love to connect the dots of all the things that catch my attention, so I write about infosec, payments, risk and fraud and try to make sense of it all in my own mind… If by reading my posts, people’s attitude towards information security improves even slightly, I would be very happy. Right now, with all the fuss about the various data privacy laws, I try to give people a few tips on what to watch out for, especially with cloud computing and how to use fraud indicators to secure infosec investments. As we all know, 2011 was dubbed the “Year of the Hack”, so it’s not surprising that my second most popular topic is about incident response (especially as according to DataLossDB.org, 2012 is not looking any better and we can already predict a 20% increase in the number of breaches if things continue at the same pace)… It’s also fascinating to see that in this interconnected world we live in, there is more and more overlap between the physical and the virtual world. You see, I love cars, but I never would have thought that this hobby of mine could have any links whatsoever with my job, until I saw the article about Mercedes-Benz being able to upgrade the in-car system remotely and then the one about smart meters… What could possibly go wrong?…
Neira
About Neira Jones
With more than 20 years Financial Services experience, Neira is currently Head of Payment Security at Barclaycard where she is responsible for security compliance of circa 100,000 customers & 3rd parties. She has received the Information Security Person of the Year Award in April 2012 from SC Magazine at the same time as her team scooped up the prestigious SC Magazine Award for Information Security Team of the Year for the 2nd year in a row.
Not content with this, February 2012 saw Barclaycard winning two awards at the Merchant Payments Ecosystem conference for “Data Security” & “Merchants” for successfully steering Barclaycard and its customers through the changes in payment security, and in particular with the PCI DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard). She is a member of the Infosecurity Europe Hall of Fame and has been on the PCI Security Standards Council Board of Advisors since 2009.
Follow Neira on Twitter:@NeiraJones