Yahoo To Hire TrustyCon’s Stamos As Chief Information Security Officer

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Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) reportedly named Alex Stamos, the founder of TrustyCon, as its new chief information security officer (CISO).

According to Re/code the appointment of Stamos was confirmed by people familiar with the situation. Stamos will assume his role as CISO at Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) on March 10. He will directly report to the company’s CEO Marissa Mayer.

Well-known security expert

Stamos is well-known in the computer security industry as the primary organizer of TrustyCon, a security conference, which was held in San Francisco on Thursday. He is the co-founder of iSEC Partners, a security services and consulting firm. He is the chief technology officer of Artemis Internet, a domain name hosting company responsible in overseeing the administration, application, and operations of the .secure TLD.

He is one of the most respected researchers in the field of web applications security and web services. Stamos serves as speaker in some of the most important conferences in the in internet security industry including Black Hat, CanSecWest, DefCon, and Microsoft BlueHat.

Stamos will replace Justin Somaini, the former chief information security officer of Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) who resigned from his position in January last year. There were speculations that Somaini resignation was partially due to the hacking problems that happened with the refreshed Yahoo Mail, vulnerabilities in cross-site scripting or XSS attacks. Somaini is currently serving as vice president and chief trust officer at Box, an enterprise cloud company.

TrustyCon

TrustyCon was organized after majority of the speakers in the RSA Conference pulled out in protest of the allegations that security company RSA conspired with the National Security Agency (NSA). Last December, it was reported that RSA entered into a $10 million secret contract with the NSA to provide backdoor access to the intelligence agency to its security software. RSA denied the report.

One of the security experts who pulled out from the RSA Confrence was Mikko Hyppönen of F-Secure.

“For me it was a very personal decision. The revelations of the cooperation of a security company with an intelligence agency regarding weakening security are the definition of losing trust. If our users don’t trust us we lose,” said Hyppönen.

Stamos and his fellow organizers sold out 400 tickets for TrustyCon within three days. There are plans that the conference will continue in the future. Some companies offered sponsorships such as SpiderOak CloudFlare.

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