WhatHat’s Jeremiah Grossman Leaving Security Firm

Jeremiah Grossman Leaving WhiteHat Security After 15 Years

WhiteHat Security founder Jeremiah Grossman announced on Monday that he will be leaving the application security firm he started nearly 15 years ago.

Grossman, the company’s founding CEO and a former information security officer at Yahoo, started the company in 2001, said his last day at Santa Clara, Calif.-based WhiteHat would be at the end of this month.

“Something as important as the Web must be protected and I’ve always felt it was a privilege to do so. For the last 15 years, as founder of WhiteHat Security, I’ve done exactly that every single day,” Grossman wrote in a blog post. “WhiteHat has not just changed my life, it has been my life — wholly inseparable. Bittersweet as it is, the end of March will be my last day.” 

WhiteHat Sentinel, the company’s flagship cloud-based platform, helps test and monitor web sites for security vulnerabilities. The company also offers a mobile edition of Sentinel that lets businesses assess the source code and runtime interactions of mobile applications.

While Grossman seems determined to take on new challenges in the security space, he has not yet revealed exactly what he will be working on next.

“While I do have plans for things to work on, like launching another business or two in a few months, I’m also leaving time open to see what other opportunities might bubble up,” he told SecurityWeek.

“While I’m not yet ready to reveal those details, what I can share is that I remain genuinely excited about the future of the security industry,” Grossman wrote in his blog post. “I’m not going anywhere. Every day I see new and interesting problems that I’d like an opportunity to solve and expand my horizons. More than anything, that’s why I’m leaving WhiteHat, but its spirit will always be with me and continue to influence my life. Any of us has the capacity to change the world, we just have to allow ourselves the chance to do so.”

Grossman, who lives in Hawaii, is also founder of the Web Application Security Consortium and a popular speaker across various security conferences.

Grossman joins other well-known security leaders who have made transitions recently, including HD Moore, who recently announced that he would leave Boston-based Rapid7 to join a new venture capital firm, and Tom Kellermann, who left his post as Chief Cybersecurity Officer at Trend Micro to form a new investment fund focused on investing in innovative cybersecurity startups.