Security Chief Expected to Leave -- WSJ
March 20 2018 - 3:02AM
Dow Jones News
By Deepa Seetharaman and Robert McMillan
This article is being republished as part of our daily
reproduction of WSJ.com articles that also appeared in the U.S.
print edition of The Wall Street Journal (March 20, 2018).
Facebook Inc.'s security chief, Alex Stamos, plans to step down
from the embattled social-media company this year, people familiar
with the matter said, following clashes with policy executives and
an internal reorganization that whittled down his
responsibilities.
Since the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Mr. Stamos has been
at the center of Facebook's response to Russian efforts to
manipulate public discourse using its platform. He and other
security officials often argued that Facebook should publicly
disclose more details about the Russian efforts, a stance often at
odds with the more cautious approach advocated by Facebook's policy
team, overseen by Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, people
familiar with the internal deliberations said.
In January, the bulk of Mr. Stamos's security team was moved to
groups managed by other executives, the people said. That helped
prompt his decision to step down, which Mr. Stamos has told
associates he plans to do in August, they said.
Mr. Stamos posted a message on Twitter late Monday saying:
"Despite the rumors, I'm still fully engaged with my work at
Facebook. It's true that my role did change. I'm currently spending
more time exploring emerging security risks and working on election
security." He didn't address if he planned to step down from
Facebook in the future.
A Facebook spokesman described Mr. Stamos as a "valued member of
the team" without addressing the security chief's planned
departure, which was reported Monday by the New York Times.
Mr. Stamos has been Facebook's chief security officer since June
2015. He raised the alarm inside Facebook about Russian activity a
month after the 2016 election by sending a memo to Chief Executive
Mark Zuckerberg and other top officials saying that Russia had run
an information operation campaign on the platform, The Wall Street
Journal reported this month.
Last spring, Mr. Stamos's team pushed to mention Russia's role
in a report published last April about information operations on
Facebook, but his team was overruled, the Journal previously
reported.
It wasn't until September that Facebook officials said
Russian-backed actors were behind manipulation efforts on its
platform during and after the election.
A year ago, Mr. Stamos often informed employees about Facebook's
efforts to bolster its platform, but he was less visible internally
in recent months, according to people familiar with the matter.
Another executive responsible for safety and security at Facebook,
Guy Rosen, started discussing those efforts instead, the people
said.
In January, most of the security team was moved under Mr. Rosen
and Jay Parikh, who oversees Facebook's engineering and
infrastructure teams, the people said.
Mr. Stamos was left in charge of Facebook's red team, a group of
security professionals who conduct test cyberattacks on its
infrastructure to evaluate its resilience, where he was working on
protecting Facebook from future election interference
campaigns.
News of Mr. Stamos's planned departure comes as Facebook is
confronting a new crisis over how it dealt with possible improper
access and handling of user information by data-analysis firm
Cambridge Analytica. Mr. Stamos weighed in on the controversy
Saturday on Twitter, lamenting the difficulty for Facebook
executives to weigh in on such complex issues publicly "in this
media environment."
Mr. Stamos is no stranger to Russian cyberattacks. He was
security chief at Yahoo during the largest security breach in
history. That breach, involving 3 billion user accounts, was
eventually linked to the Russian government, according to U.S.
authorities. Russia has denied involvement.
For Facebook, Mr. Stamos's departure would be "a blow," said
Thomas Rid, a professor of strategic studies at Johns Hopkins
University. "It's hard to think of a senior executive who works on
security at any major technology company who has a better
reputation," he said.
Although Mr. Stamos was Facebook's security chief during a time
when the company's platform was widely misused, Mr. Rid gave Mr.
Stamos credit for being candid about Facebook's problems.
"Facebook has gotten a lot of bad press, but let's also give
them more credit for being more open than any other tech company in
their space," Mr. Rid said.
Write to Deepa Seetharaman at Deepa.Seetharaman@wsj.com and
Robert McMillan at Robert.Mcmillan@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
March 20, 2018 02:47 ET (06:47 GMT)
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