Yahoo has filled the vacancy in its CISO office, today announcing the hiring of former Twitter and Rapid7 security executive Bob Lord.
Lord starts in his new role Nov. 9. He was most recently Rapid7’s CISO-in-residence; he has spent much of the last two decades in high-profile security positions with Red Hat, AOL-Time Warner and Netscape.
Honored to be joining the Yahoo Paranoids, world-class security talent fighting for the users! https://t.co/bA7r6IgsR6
— Bob Lord (@boblord) October 26, 2015
At Twitter, Lord served as director of information security and was the company’s first security hire. His legacy includes the establishment of a security and compliance operation, as well as the implementation of two-factor authentication and out-of-band account recovery options.
From Twitter, Lord moved on this spring to Rapid7, where as CISO in residence, he worked closely with customers as an advocate for security, threat modeling, awareness training and more from a policy and technology perspective.
Lord takes over for Alex Stamos, another well-regarded security veteran who in June joined Facebook as its CSO.
Stamos, who worked at Yahoo for a little more than a year, continued Yahoo’s acceleration of the encryption of its web-based services. Those efforts began in earnest after a flurry of revelations in the Snowden documents showed how the NSA and other intelligence agencies were siphoning data from unencrypted fiber optic cable connections between Google’s and Yahoo’s data centers in particular.
In April 2014, Stamos announced that the company was follow Google’s lead and encrypting those links. Yahoo also enabled encryption between its mail servers and other email providers, and earlier this year the company released an extension that enabled end-to-end encryption for all Yahoo email users. All search queries and traffic to the Yahoo home page also run over HTTPS by default now.
During his time at Yahoo, Stamos also built an enviable roster of security talent in a group known internally as the Yahoo Paranoids. Among his hires was Chris Rohlf, a respected researcher, who is head of penetration testing at the company now.
“Bob will lead our security team – known as the Paranoids – in offensive and defensive protection of our more than one billion users around the world and for our employees globally,” said Jay Rossiter, SVP, Product & Engineering, Science & Technology in a post to Yahoo’s Tumblr page. “He’ll work closely across our teams and collaboratively across the industry to ensure that we’re providing the highest level of security possible to our users, and continue to provide our users with the latest security innovations.”
