Facebook won’t be replacing its security chief following the departure Alex Stamos

Facebook hasn’t had the best year for security and privacy following the reveal of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, with founder Mark Zuckerberg often trying to talk his way out of a jam. Now, the platform’s security chief Alex Stamos will be leaving and it looks like Facebook won’t be replacing him.

Stamos remained amicable about the split, taking to Facebook to detail how thankful he is to have worked at the company rather than blast the platform for its security pitfalls, resulting in 87 million users having their data exposed.

“While I have greatly enjoyed this work, the time has come for me to move on from my position as Chief Security Officer at Facebook. Starting in September, I will join Stanford University full-time as a teacher and researcher,” reveals Stamos. In particular, Stamos will be heading a cybersecurity course that explores the defensive and offensive methods of hacking.

The departure of Stamos was decided upon as early as last year, with the ex-security head originally pegged to leave in March 2018. Facebook persuaded him to stay until August before freeing him to focus on “ethically designing and implementing new technologies” for the university. Following his exit, Facebook has immediately dissolved its dedicated security team, instead planning to litter security experts throughout the platform’s various divisions to better lock things down.

“We are not naming a new CSO, since earlier this year we embedded our security engineers, analysts, investigators, and other specialists in our product and engineering teams to better address the emerging security threats we face,” said a Facebook spokesperson said to The Verge. “We expect to be judged on what we do to protect people’s security, not whether we have someone with a certain title.”

Moving forward, Facebook is “investing heavily in security to address new types of threats” despite its move from a traditional structure, claiming that its newfound approach has “helped us do more to keep people safe.”

KitGuru Says: This segmented approach could cause issues in communication between the various different teams, however I can personally see the benefit so long as each member is regularly updated on others’ work. Do you think this move spells further concern for the security of Facebook?

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