FICO Hacks Itself to Prevent Cybercriminal Attacks

Vickie Miller is trying to break into FICO’s computer network, whose hundreds of servers store essential data for Visa, MasterCard, and many other large corporations and banks.

Don’t mistake this for hacking. Miller is the security director at FICO, the credit-scoring company. She’s using an approach to computer security called penetration testing, which lets her scour a digital map to find ways to break into her own company’s data before a cybercriminal can. “We knew we needed, as aggressively as possible, to be able to find our weaknesses and fix them before anybody else does,” Miller says. “We had been focused on defending and responding. I knew we could do better.”