Former Department of Homeland Security cyber-security chief Philip Reitinger has been named as the new executive vice president and Chief Information Security Officer of Sony Corporation.
In his new position, Reitinger will be in charge of global information security and privacy at the electronics giant effective today. More specifically, Reitinger will be responsible for maintaining the security of Sony’s information assets and services in addition to managing information security, privacy and internet safety across the corporation.
This announcement comes shortly after a speech last week at the IFA consumer electronics conference wherein Sony’s CEO, Howard Stringer, claimed that the company was more secure than ever. Of course, Sony’s PlayStation Network went down for nearly a month last spring after suffering a data breach that eventually ended up affecting some 100 million individuals. The company’s security woes broadened after its home country of Japan made it wait to bring the network back online citing security concerns, a position validated two days later when the network went down again during the mandatory password reset process.
Reitinger most recently served as the top information security official at DHS, a position from which he resigned in mid-May amid surges in troublemaking from hacker-collectives like Anonymous and LulzSec and a rash of high profile attacks on the US government, businesses and government contractors.
Before joining DHS in March 2009, he worked in Microsoft’s Trustworthy Computing division, and according to the Sony press release, he has also worked with the US departments of Defense and Justice.
While with DHS, Reitinger had reportedly done a decent job curbing some of the notorious inter-departmental bickering for which the federal government’s information security efforts had been known for the better part of the last decade.
