Don't be fooled by Christi Maherry's appearance. She's a pretty blonde with a slightly self-effacing manner. But if the need arises, she could inflict serious injury that would leave you reeling - if you ever recovered enough to reel. Maherry, 46, used to be an expert in unarmed combat in a special VIP protection unit, guarding the likes of Nelson Mandela and Prince Philip, or taking tea at the White House. She's still in security, but now concentrates on the cyber kind as the MD of her own company, LAWtrust.
Maherry laughs off the idea that she grew up wanting to be a bodyguard, but she always loved security and applied to National Intelligence when they ran a recruitment drive. "I went there a week after my 18th birthday. I was so young and naive," she remembers. "I moved from Durban to Pretoria and it was such a huge culture shock for me that every weekend I went home."
Women were not allowed to join the VIP Protection Unit until Maherry wrote a motivation for why they should be included, and became the first woman on the team. "There was a lot of resentment from the men," she says. "I always believe that anything men can do, women can do better. Now with hindsight, I know that women still do things better, but men can pick it up too." She smiles as she says it, but you know she's serious.
Maherry would always question orders if they didn't make sense to her, but she was soon knocked into line. If she lagged behind the team on training runs, the men were made to do pushups until she caught up. "I learned very valuable lessons about loyalty and team work," she says. "We didn't do James Bond stuff and I know nothing about spying, but it was quite exciting and it was tough."
Background checks
Her National Intelligence work also involved vetting people through background checks, which helped when she joined the SA Certifications Agency in 1996.
Then, in 2006, she and her husband Maeson formed LAWtrust to specialise in cyber and information security. "We put the trust into digital business transactions and focus on strong authentication and encryption. We have the best guys in the country who can develop cryptography algorithms," she says.
It's big business, and a growing niche. "Cybercrime is the biggest threat businesses are facing. All the other crimes together are not as big as cybercrime," she says. "There are so many attackers out there and companies need to be on the offensive." Attacks normally involve an insider, so the weakness is on the human side. "Criminals use technology at the end, but they still need a person to start it. So we provide accountability as well as fraud management solutions."
By ensuring that people are made accountable for their actions, such as only being able to issue a document after recording their fingerprint, a transparent audit trail is created that makes fraud difficult. LAWtrust became South Africa's first trusted provider of Advanced Electronic Signatures (AES), an electronic signature that has passed the test for documents that need to be legally binding.
I always believe that anything men can do, women can do better.
A more recent win was its success in providing security services for the new smart ID cards that are replacing our old green ID books. "When we set up the company, it was our dream that every citizen should have a digital identity; we achieved that by winning the digital identify part for the national ID cards. What we're doing with the card is groundbreaking," Maherry says. "Home Affairs won an international award for the technology because it's world-class."
Individual businesspeople can also benefit from LAWtrust's technologies to instantly sign documents to be legally binding. They can even do that via an app on their cellphone, so they can sign anything from anywhere at any time.
Bleeding edge
Companies with a global footprint can send documents securely online and get valid, authenticated signatures from everyone who needs to sign, without the risk of the document being tampered with. "We used to courier a document overseas; now we upload it and sign it and it's legally binding," says Maherry. "It's a huge boost in efficiency. In five years' time, we're all going to be signing things digitally."
Maherry talks confidently about the nitty-gritty details behind the systems, but she's not a geek. "I'm not a tech genius; I look at the business applications for it. I'm probably our team's worst customer - I use whatever they develop and I'm the first one to complain if it doesn't work."
The company has about 60 staff members, 45 of them IT experts, but isn't making the most of its output, she fears. "We have 51 products that we've developed ourselves and we're not doing them justice. We are busy evaluating which ones we actually want to resell to other companies."
At least the proliferation of cybercrime is seeing demand pick up without the company having to market its services as hard as it used to. It was once tough explaining what a digital signature was, Maherry says. "Most people thought it was never going to happen, didn't understand it and didn't want to embrace it. But it's the only way to protect your assets."
As everything goes digital, more information is vulnerable and people need to positively identify who they're dealing with. "That's the gap we fill," she says. "It's very bleeding edge, but we have tenacity."
This article was first published in Brainstorm magazine. Click here to read the complete article at the Brainstorm website.
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