CISA names big tech, financial execs and others to Cybersecurity Advisory Committee

CISA Director Jen Easterly announced the inaugural board members today. The group’s first meeting is scheduled for Dec. 10.

Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Director Jen Easterly named 23 members to CISA’s new Cybersecurity Advisory Committee, including representatives from big technology companies, the financial sector and academia.

CISA announced the inaugural board members today. The members are appointed by CISA Director Jen Easterly. The group’s first meeting is scheduled for Dec. 10.

The panel exists to provide CISA with “recommendations on matters related to the development, refinement and implementation of policies, programs, planning and training pertaining to the cybersecurity mission of the Agency,” according to a charter approved in May.

The group will make recommendations on a range of topics including “growing the cyber workforce; reducing systemic risk to national critical functions; igniting the power of the hacker community to help defend the nation; combating misinformation and disinformation impacting the security of critical infrastructure; and transforming public-private partnership into true operational collaboration,” CISA said in an announcement.

The members include representatives from big technology firms, including Vijaya Gadde, Twitter’s legal, public policy, and trust and safety lead, as well as Georgios Stathakopoulos, who heads up the enterprise information security program at Apple. Easterly also named Stephen Schmidt, vice president and chief information security officer for Amazon Web Services; Christopher Young, executive vice president of business development, strategy and ventures at Microsoft; and Niloofar Razi Howe, board member at Tenable.

Easterly also appointed Matthew Prince, co-founder and chief executive of Cloudflare, a web infrastructure and security company.

The financial sector is also represented with Lori Beer, global chief information officer of JPMorgan Chase & Co; Ron Green, chief security officer for Mastercard; and Ted Schlein, general partner at venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins.

Easterly also followed through on a pledge to include the hacker community by appointing Jeff Moss, the founder of the DEF CON and Black Hat security conferences.

She also named Suzanne Spaulding, who led CISA’s predecessor organization as the under secretary for national protection and programs during the Obama administration. Spaulding is now a senior advisor for homeland security at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Easterly also picked Kevin Mandia, chief executive and director at cybersecurity firm Mandiant, which first alerted the National Security Agency to the SolarWinds breach late last year.

The committee also has multiple members from the academic community, including Alex Stamos, director of the Stanford Internet Observatory, and Robert Chesney, associate dean for academic affairs at the University of Texas School of Law and co-founder of www.lawfareblog.com. Easterly also appointed Patrick Gallagher, University of Pittsburgh’s chancellor, and Kate Starbird, associate professor in the Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering at the University of Washington.

Additional members include Austin Mayor Steve Adler; Johnson & Johnson chief information security officer Marene Allison; Southern Company chief executive Thomas Fanning; Nuala O’Connor, senior vice president and chief counsel of Digital Citizenship at Walmart; Nicole Perloth, a cybersecurity journalist at The New York Times; Alicia Tate-Nadeau, acting director of the Illinois Emergency Management Agency; and Nicole Wong, who previously served as deputy U.S. Chief Technology Officer in the Obama Administration, and is currently a principal of NWong Strategies.

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