BlackBerry has appointed David Kleidermacher as its new chief security officer, the smartphone maker announced on Tuesday.
As chief security officer at BlackBerry, Kleidermacher will oversee product security and lead the company’s global product security group, which is responsible for security research and development, incident response, product management, ethical hacking, certifications, and services.
With more than 23 years of technology experience, Kleidermacher has authored numerous articles and whitepapers, and he even wrote a book on the security of embedded systems.
“If you think we have a big security problem with a billion smartphones, think what will happen when we have a trillion autonomous objects,” Kleidermacher said. “I think BlackBerry is uniquely positioned to meet this challenge head on and I’m excited to be part of it.”
Kleidermacher started his career at Green Hills Software. For the past nine years, he had been the company’s chief technology officer. The expert also acted as chief technology officer at Green Hills subsidiary Integrity Global Security, where he led the team that developed INTEGRITY, a high reliability operating system certified by the NSA to EAL 6+ High Robustness, the highest level of security ever achieved.
“David is an outstanding addition to our best-in-class security team, and he will help extend BlackBerry’s gold standard of security as we work with customers to meet new cybersecurity challenges,” said John Chen, BlackBerry’s CEO and executive chairman. ”In particular, David’s knowledge of securing the Internet of Things and embedded systems will be invaluable as we execute on our strategy and continue to expand our management of the world’s mobile endpoints.”
Kleidermacher’s predecessor is Scott Totzke, who left BlackBerry in June 2014. Totzke later took up the role of senior vice president of device and enterprise security at Chinese telecoms giant Huawei.
In December, BlackBerry completed the acquisition of Secusmart GmbH, a Germany-based provider of high-security voice and data encryption and anti-eavesdropping solutions. The company said the acquisition would strengthen its leadership in secure enterprise mobility and bolster its end-to-end security offerings.