SAN FRANCISCO — RSA CONFERENCE 2012 — Qualys CEO Philippe Courtot is pushing a new initiative aimed at taking on security issues fundamental to the Internet.
The effort will be led by the Trustworthy Internet Movement (TIM), a nonprofit created to take on issues such as SSL governance and the spread of botnets and malware. TIM is built around three core pillars:
Collaboration: TIM will provide collaborative frameworks for discussing these problems and working towards solutions through expert and stakeholder working groups. Working group results will be published on a regular basis.
Individual Expertise: TIM will leverage specialized knowledge and expertise from the brightest and best in the industry to guide and support working group developments.
The non-profit is recruiting this week at the RSA Conference in San Francisco, and is looking to draw talent from large corporations and cloud providers, as well as help from the venture capital community. Courtot pledged $500,000 in seed money to get the initiative off the ground.
“With two billion people relying on the Internet for much of their personal and business lives, it is incumbent upon the industry to put its collective heads together and resolve the problems of online security, privacy, and reliability once and for all,” Courtot said in a statement. “This is no longer just an issue of technology but of society as a whole. We have a unique opportunity with the rapid spread of cloud-based services to leverage the power of the industry and the wider community of Internet users to resolve the issues that are holding back the Internet from fulfilling its true potential.”