About me
Neal O’Farrell is one of the world’s longest serving security and privacy experts, and has been fighting and writing about cybercrime and fraud around the world for nearly 40 years.
He was also one of the first champions for the growing importance of human security - employee and user security awareness - nearly 20 years ago in a series of articles in TechTarget called The Human Perimeter.
In 2003 he led the launch of Think Security First, an ambitious year-long experiment to raise the security awareness of an entire city (Walnut Creek, California, population 64,000). Partners in the award-winning program included Microsoft, Cisco, AT&T, McAfee, and DHS.
Blending data ethics with security and privacy, Neal was appointed Senior Security Advisor to the Congressionally-mandated Stock Act panel (an amendment to the 1978 Ethics in Government Act) and was also a member of the Federal Communications Commission's Cybersecurity Roundtable Working Group.
As Executive Director of the non-profit Identity Theft Council, Neal has counseled thousands of victims of identity theft and taken on cases referred to him by the FBI and Secret Service. In 2011 the Council won SC Magazine's Editor's Choice Award, presented at RSA.
Neal was also the first ever recipient of the Eigen Award, for his work in fraud prevention, presented by the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners (ACFE) at the headquarters of Wells Fargo in San Francisco.
Neal was the producer of "In the Company of Thieves," the first in a series of documentaries that takes viewers inside the world of some of the most notorious identity thieves and cybercrooks.
He has advised many different organizations on data breach prevention and response, and has been quoted in dozens of publications including the New York Times, Forbes, Inc., the Wall St. Journal, the Huffington Post, CNN Money, BusinessWeek, USA Today, SmartMoney, CNET, Information Week, the National Law Journal, Today.com, NBC, CBS, CNBC, Fox Business, and the South China Morning Post.
He has spoken at events around the world, from keynoting in Las Vegas, to discussing the rise of surveillance capitalism at the headquarters of Facebook in Menlo Park California.
