Cybersecurity vendor SentinelOne has moved Alex Stamos into the CISO seat to manage its security engineering and operations teams.
Stamos, who joined SentinelOne in November 2023 with the acquisition of the Krebs Stamos Group, assumes the title of Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) and will focus on “developing and delivering secure-by-design systems that enterprises can trust to keep them safe,” the company said.
Stamos, who previously headed up security programs at Yahoo and Facebook, has recently emerged as an outspoken critic of Microsoft (a SentinelOne competitor), accusing the software giant of a “dangerous addiction to security revenue.”
In Thursday’s note announcing his move into the CISO office, Stamos repeated the sentiment. “Organizations must be able to trust that their providers are focused on chasing adversaries, not dollars,” he said. “Unfortunately, upselling security and misleading customers has become an accepted part of the business model of huge enterprise software companies.”
SentinelOne CTO Ric Smith referenced state actors targeting large cloud and security providers to gain access to the world’s most important companies and argued that “security cannot be an afterthought. It has to come first.”
“Tens of thousands of organizations rely on SentinelOne to keep their organizations safe. We have always believed that our ethical duty is to design products with a security-first mindset and uphold the highest standards in delivering them. Alex is the ideal person to lead and accelerate our efforts,” Smith said of the new CISO appointment.
Stamos is a longtime presence in the cybersecurity industry, having co-founded security consulting firm iSEC Partners in 2004 before leadership stints in Silicon Valley.
He was also the founding director of the Stanford Internet Observatory at the Cyber Policy Center and a contributor to Harvard’s Defending Digital Democracy Project.
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