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Zero Day

Ryan Naraine, Emil Protalinski and Dancho Danchev

U.S.'s cybersecurity director has resigned.

By | March 8, 2009, 11:43pm PDT

Rod Beckstrom, an author and Silicon Valley entrepreneur, has resigned the position of National Director of Cybersecurity.

Mr. Beckstrom’s position, which reported to the head of DHS, involved wrestling the all of the different Federal agencies into forming a coherent cybersecurity policy.

His role appeared to have been crippled from the start.  According to the WSJ, Mr. Beckstrom’s office “was funded for just five weeks out of the past year and had just five people working in it. During the rest of the period, he borrowed staff and office space from other agencies.”

This sounds like it was a job that bordered on the impossible. It is difficult enough to move a government organization. It is even harder to move several organizations to the same point. Making all of those organizations move at the tempo of information security events probably proved to be far more difficult than the previous two tasks.

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Topics

Adam J. O'Donnell, Ph.D. is an R&D engineer who has focused on computer security since 2000.

Disclosure

Adam O'Donnell

Adam J. O’Donnell currently works for Cloudmark, a messaging security company whose clients include the majority of the Tier 1 customer-facing service providers as well as mobile carriers and social networks. He serves on the advisory committee for the SOURCE Security Conference, as well as several conference technical program committees. Many of his close friends work in the security industry, and he will disclose those relationships as he deems it necessary.

Biography

Adam O'Donnell

Adam J. O'Donnell, Ph.D. is an R&D engineer who has focused on computer security since 2000. He currently is the Director of Emerging Technologies at Cloudmark, a messaging security company located in San Francisco.

Adam early on mastered the art of writing in complete sentences, using both hands and one foot. Later, he learned to do so with each individually. After fourteen years of apprenticeship in the mist-covered hills of central Nepal, Dr. O'Donnell emerged an unparalleled digital warrior and in desperate need of a anti-fungal wash.

Approaching both life and enterprise security with the verve of a particular capuchin, he is respected the world over as an observer of all he sees. Adam's dry blade of analysis will sever the hard candy shell surrounding most technical security concepts, and significantly goo-ify the remaining so as to be consumable in small bites with sufficiently large servings of digestive aids. Just what the doctor ordered.

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RE: U.S.'s cybersecurity director has resigned.
birumut Updated - 3rd May 2011
Well done! Thank you very much for professional templates and community edition
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