After more than 20 years with the FBI, the nation’s top cyber cop has made a move to the private sector. Shawn Henry will join two former McAfee executives as President of CrowdStrike Services, a subsidiary of security startup CrowdStrike that will focus on helping organizations protect intellectual property and national security information.
CrowdStrike was publically introduced earlier this year after George Kurtz, the former CTO of McAfee, Dmitri Alperovitch (McAfee’s ex-VP of Threat Research), and Gregg Marston announced that the company had received a massive $26 million in funding.
The company isn’t well-known, but it’s been said that they are attempting to use Big-Data – as in data mining and aggregation – in order to help their clients protect their digital assets, and fend off attacks sourced from external threats and those on the inside.
Henry, who was the executive assistant director of the FBI’s Criminal, Cyber, Response, and Services Branch, as well as the assistant director in charge of the Washing field office, brings some solid investigative and management muscle to the firm. In March 2012, Henry announced he would be leaving the FBI to make a move to the private sector.
“Today’s most successful thieves don’t carry guns, and they don’t slip through basement windows in the middle of the night with a satchel. The successful thieves of today are running rampant through your computer networks, unfettered, every single day,” Henry wrote in a blog post.
“I was part of the US government cyber strategy and operations for a long time. There are brilliant minds and dedicated people serving society with passion and commitment to securing our digital future. I was proud to be associated with them, and consider many my friends. Too often, though, WHAT we do is not able to keep up with what we MUST do. You can only be punched in the face so many times before you fall to your knees.”
Using what he learned from his time working in the government, Henry is looking at how to apply those skills in the private sector by developing CrowdStrike’s core offerings including incident response, enterprise adversary and malware assessment, and response and recovery.
“CrowdStrike provides me the opportunity to continue this fight, from ‘the other side,’ using intelligence and technology to get in FRONT of the problem rather than merely reacting to it,” he added.
The announcement of Henry’s placement also included a note that the company is currently scouting for talent. Though they did not explain what positions were to be filled first.
