Discovery Park Distinguished Lecture Series to welcome MasterCard EVP of cybersecurity product innovation

Simon Hunt, executive vice president of cybersecurity product innovation at MasterCard, will speak Wednesday (Oct. 17) on how cybercriminals spend their illicit money and the latest technologies to thwart them.

The event is a joint venture of the Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security (CERIAS) and Discovery Park. MasterCard is a member of the CERIAS Strategic Partnership Program, which encourages industry participation and feedback of the research being conducted at the center.

Hunt’s hourlong talk, “Cybercrime Funds Evil — How Cybercriminals Spend Their Money, and Using Lasers and the Dark Web to Thwart Them,” is open to the public and will begin at 5:30 p.m. in Lawson Computer Science Building, Room 1142. 

Hunt will present a perspective on the daily arms race security professionals in the payment arena fight against their criminal counterparts. Focus will be placed on how criminals monetize their activity using payment and banking networks to cash out their illicit gains, and what they spend that money on. Covering topics such as dark web data mining, ATM network control, cash-out attacks, and physical compromises of payment devices via skimmers, shimmers, cameras and more, Hunt will discuss the fine line between cyber-defense and offense. The talk also will delve into the “evil scientist” side of protecting cashless payment networks using caustic chemicals, electron and X-ray microscopes, lasers and picosecond imaging technology.

Before joining MasterCard, Hunt held a number of senior leadership roles at McAfee/Intel Security and was also the founder and CTP of SafeBoot and EVP and CTO of WinMagic. He holds a number of patents on diverse topics such as authentication, encryption, smart matter, drone technology, network security and malware detection.

The Discovery Park Distinguished Lecture Series is made possible by the Lilly Endowment as a mechanism for Purdue and Discovery Park to bring to campus the latest thinking about science and technology and other broad areas of public interest.

Contact:  Nicole Finley, 765-494-3662, kingman@purdue.edu  
Writer:  Elizabeth Harwood, 765-494-7324, eharwood@purdue.edu