M. E. KABAY, PhD

756 words of exhaustive self-laudatory prose

M. E. Kabay began teaching his high school classmates how to use the slide rule in 1963 (NOT the ideal way of being popular) and began programming IBM 1401 computers in assembly language in 1965. In 1976, he completed his PhD from Dartmouth College in applied statistics and invertebrate zoology and then taught statistics, programming and biology as a university professor in Canada and overseas.

He began teaching applied statistics at Dartmouth College in 1975 in a course for Biology graduate students and served as adjunct faculty in the University of Ottawa Institute for Government Informatics Professionals, the John Abbot College Programmers’ Course and their Technical Support Program, and the McGill University Management Institute before joining Norwich University.

In 1979, he joined a compiler team for a new 4GL and RDBMS in the U.S. and then joined Hewlett-Packard Canada in 1980 as an operating systems and database performance specialist, winning the Systems Engineer of the Year Award in 1982 and teaching MPE operating system, IMAGE/3000 database and VPLUS/3000 GUI-design courses as well as serving as support engineer to HP’s hospital and university customers and managing HP’s bilingual call center (Phone-In Consulting Service) for Québec and the Maritime provinces.

He taught database and technical support courses for a decade at John Abbott College in Ste Anne de Bellevue on the West end of Montreal Island in the 1980s through the mid 1990s. He founded his own company, JINBU Corporation, in 2006; much of his consulting work in that firm was database performance analysis and redesign for optimization. Other assignments included overall operating system analysis and optimization for improved performance to meet service-level agreements for quality of service.

He served as Director of Education for the National Computer Security Association (NCSA, later ICSA and then TruSecure) from 1991 to 1999 and then worked briefly with Adario/AtomicTangerine where he supported the International Institute for Information Integrity® (I-4®).

He was a member of the committees defining the Common Body of Knowledge for the Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) designation in the mid-1990s and earned his CISSP in 1997. His certification as an Information Systems Security Management Professional (ISSMP) was granted in 2005. He terminated his use of the CISSP and ISSMP designations in 2021.

Since 1986 (and as of early 2021), he has published over 2,000 articles in operations management and security, written a college textbook on enterprise security (McGraw-Hill, 1996), and served as Technical Editor of the 4th (2002), 5th (2009) and 6th (2014) editions of the Computer Security Handbook (Wiley). He wrote two security-management columns a week distributed by Network World < http://www.mekabay.com/nwss/ >fromFebruary 2000 to September 2011 and one per week for InfoSec Perception < http://www.mekabay.com/perception/ > from October 2011 to the end of 2013. His public Website has a total of over 2,000 PDF files and over 500 instructional PowerPoint files freely available to anyone for non-commercial use.

He has been an invited lecturer at the United States War College, the Pentagon, NATO HQ in Brussels, and at NATO Counterintelligence training in Germany. He was inducted into the Information Systems Security Association (ISSA) Hall of Fame in December 2004 and earned his Information Systems Security Management Professional (ISSMP) designation in November 2005.

From 2002 to 2009, he was the creator and Director of the Master's Program in Information Assurance (MSIA) in the College of Graduate and Continuing Studies (CGCS) at Norwich University, Northfield, Vermont where he was also the Chief Technical Officer of the CGCS from 2007 to 2009. Returning full time to the School of Business & Management in 2009, he was promoted to Professor of Computer Information Systems in May 2011 and was appointed Associate Director of the Norwich University Center for Advanced Computing and Digital Forensics in July 2011.

Students and everyone else are welcome to friend him on Facebook for a stream of links to interesting information security and high-technology articles (mostly from The Guardian, BBC News, National Public Radio and Washington Post) with frequent forays into politics, culture, science, and puns.

He retired on 31 December 2021 after teaching at Norwich for 20 years. He is keen on using his free time to write novels, give concerts as a bass-baritone soloist, read stories and poems at public libraries, contribute dramatic reading for audio books and have fun with his beloved wife Deborah Black his LV -- Lux vitae, light of his life. In May 2022, he was anointed (er, appointed) Emeritus Professor of Computer Science in the School of Cybersecurity, Data Science and Computing, College of Professional Schools, Norwich University.