I was 13 when I decided to become a computer programmer. Before then, I was sure that I would be an electrical engineer, like my father. However, that changed when I saw a TV spot about “Basic programming” on the local TV channel.
My parents were shocked when I told them I would like to go to a secondary school instead of the well-known high schools they preferred. I am lucky because they accepted my decision and always supported me. So, I became a computer programmer after secondary school, and three years later, I finished college at Pécs, Hungary, where I had studied mechanical engineering and computer science, and started to work as a programmer.
My father did not let me stop there. He pushed me to get more degrees in other fields like economics and management. So, I have a degree in international communications and economics, and another from a university in information management, where I learned how I could lead a company’s IT department as a CIO.
With this background, I started to work for a transaction processor company as a systems coordinator and spent 11 years there in different roles. In 2005, I fell in love with security. That was when I received the PCI DSS 1.2 as a task to evaluate and plan how to be compliant. Later, I was involved in PCI (and many other) audits to support the auditors.
I had never been in a managerial position but received an offer from another transaction processor to be their CISO, and I accepted. When I arrived at my new company and opened my new office’s door – my own office’s door – I was shocked. I had the feeling that this was too much, that I would not be enough. It was outside my comfort zone. But I took a deep breath and started to work. And after a few days, I realized that I found my place – a place where I felt the freedom to change things and make them better, My profession truly became my passion.
I love to learn. My first two industry certifications were CISA and CISM. Now I have more, CISSP and CEH, but ISACA was the organization that helped me start to build my security knowledge.
Being a woman in the IT security field, I have had some strange experiences. I was a security expert for a company, and we had a meeting on the renewal of the firewall architectural concept. One colleague turned to me at the beginning of the meeting – I was relatively new at the company – to update me, and started to explain to me what, exactly, is a “firewall.” Another time, I arrived the for the first day of a conference and received the following welcome message: “Welcome to the conference, our one-and-only-woman attendee! You do not need to worry, we have other women here, our hostesses, so you will not be alone!” And I have had several meetings with vendors where I was the meeting lead, being the IT security director of the company, but the vendors continuously addressed their comments to my colleagues, because they were men, even after they were notified that I was the decision-maker in the room. I have heard several similar stories from other women in the industry.
This brings me to why we founded WITSEC (Women in IT Security). Nine of us working in the IT security field a bit more than five years ago realized there were only a few women in our industry in Hungary, as we always met the same few ladies at conferences and other events. We had several conversations about this fact, but did not do anything until we were at a conference called Hacktivity in 2014. The conference is traditionally on Fridays and Saturdays, so it is always difficult to attract attendees to the second day of the conference. That year, they introduced the “wife ticket” to support the IT security experts at the conference and their families, and let the “wife and the children” attend with them. That was when we founded WITSEC, just to show our fellow professionals that we are here. Through this association and our activities, we aimed to show the young ladies in the country that each of them could be an IT or an IT security expert, like us. We would like to support more women in this field. Now our membership has grown beyond 30, and we have mentees, too. We have made a lot of memories from conferences we have conducted, schools we have visited and role model presentations we have made. And since 2019, we have been working together with SheLeadsTech. I am proud to be a SheLeadsTech ambassador for ISACA.
Currently, I am working at an international company – TRANSCOM – as a Global Chief Information Security Officer. I am responsible for security and compliance across the globe and am glad to have colleagues around the world. Additionally, I am president of WITSEC as well as a board member of the ISACA Budapest Chapter and a board member of (ISC)2 Hungarian Chapter. I am also a proud mother of two sons. And I have hobbies, too, like writing stories, riding horses and baking bread.
My friends always ask me, how I can manage all this?! My answer is simple: my profession is my hobby. I love to do it.
You always have time for the things that are important to you. It is your decision. It is your life.