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Comment by NotHereNotThere | Hacker News Reader

Somewhat interesting is the fact that the previous Facebook CSO was Joe Sullivan (now CSO at Uber), who did not have an "IT security" background at all; most of his career is oriented towards law (he has a J.D. after all ;))

Contrast this to Alex Stamos, who's given many presentations at Defcon/Blackhat, co-founded iSEC, EE/CS background, and it seems a bit of a mentality shift for Facebook.

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It's true that Joe's background is on the legal and policy side of things, but he presided over the softwareification of Facebook's security team. I worked closely with him for many years and he saw the need for more technology and automation; so that they could be a security team focused on not just incident response, but excellence on the technical front too. Joe and I spent a lot of time talking about technology and where things should be going, and he had his own well-formed opinions and goals. And he often deferred to other experts as a good leader does too.

I'm excited to see what Alex does since his credentials are stronger on the technology front, but the team's shift to a technology focus has been happening for a long time. I view this as another hugely positive step in that direction.

Must be fun to finally be able to talk about FB, eh Doug? :)

Joe had more of a legal focus, but if you think back to where FB was at the time there were significant problems with privacy/compliance, LERT and other external-facing security issues that made him a good choice. Similarly, Uber is in the position now where they need someone who can handle those aspects of company security and policy more than someone to tighten up the internal pcap analysis system...

Yeah, you're right. We certainly had different problems when Joe came on board and he was a great fit to lead us through fixing them. And I'm glad him and Mat and others are working to fix similar problems with Uber.

I just commented because I wanted people to know that it wasn't like there was no software focus before Joe left--things weren't as binary as that. The software focus shift had been in progress for some time before he stepped down.

And yeah, feels good to talk about FB with no filter. :-)

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