A small business owner for nearly three decades, Neal has been developing security solutions since the early 1980's, including the first voice-based biometric access control system for the banking industry, and was recently credited with creating the Identity Theft Score, the first personal identity theft risk analysis system to help consumers measure and manage their vulnerability to identity theft.

As a security educator Neal ran his first security conference in 1989, co-hosting with IBM one of Europe's first network security conferences. Since then he has been invited to speak at numerous industry conferences, including the Information Integrity World Summit, the Network Infrastructure Conference, the Financial Network Security Conference, and the Computer Security Institute Annual Conference.

Neal was also invited to Chair the first "Cybercrime on Wall Street Conference" in New York in January 2002.

Neal began his first security business when he graduated from the Dublin Institute of Technology's College of Marketing in 1982. By the time he was twenty-five he was regarded as one of the world's youngest computer security experts, helping Ireland's Top 5 banks to protect their networks from the first generation of hackers.

His achievements were recognized when he was awarded the contract to secure the first Irish Banks National Joint ATM Network and he was also retained to develop a security system for Ireland's fledgling cellular network.

In the following years Neal was involved in a variety of security initiatives, developing advanced encryption systems for government and military customers around the world. In 1988 he launched Intrepid, a government-backed project to develop a European rival for the U.S. Government STU3 secure telephone project

Neal has been at the forefront of technical innovation in the war against hackers and first started working on the challenge of identity theft in the late 1980's, developing technologies to help banks authenticate the identity of customers accessing their bank accounts and information.

In 1988 he installed the first two-factor authentication system on Irish banking networks - a technology which is now in the forefront of the battle against identity theft and especially phishing.

Neal is credited with developing the world's first encrypting fax machine (CipherFax) and later developed EtherPhone, the first product to deliver real-time, toll-quality encrypted speech over Ethernet networks.

Neal has authored more than 150 security articles and was also a Technical Editor for the "Hack Proofing" series of security guides from Syngress Publishing. He has appeared in a broad spectrum of publications, from BusinessWeek, Information Week, Smart Business, and CNN/Money, to the San Francisco Chronicle, Internet.com, Law.com, the National Law Journal, Networker, and the South China Morning Post, as well as TechTV, KPIX-TV Channel 5 (CBS affiliate San Francisco), CNN, and NBC Bay Area. Neal comes from a small business background, and raised in a family business founded in Ireland in 1919.

He was honored for his work as a security entrepreneur by being selected twice as the entrepreneur to represent Ireland in the Export to Japan Study Program in Tokyo, in 1990.

In 1993 while developing a biometrics-based access control system for Britain's largest banks, he authored "The Big Small Business Guide," a best-selling business guide published by the London Evening Standard, one of Britain's most popular newspapers. He is also the author of "Double Trouble: Guarding Your Identity in an Age of Cybercrime" and "Think Security First: Cyber Security Essentials for Today's Small Business."

Encryption background