Verizon taps FBI criminal division chief as CSO
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(InfoWorld) - The executive in charge of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation's criminal investigations division will take over as chief security officer (CSO) of Verizon Communications early next year. Michael Mason, head of the FBI's Criminal, Cyber, Response and Services Branch, will become Verizon's CSO in January 2007, the company said Tuesday. He replaces Jim Trainor, who will retire from the telecommunications giant. A 22-year FBI veteran, Mason oversees the largest branch of the FBI and is the executive responsible for the federal law enforcement organization's criminal, corruption, civil-rights, and cyber-crime investigations. Mason will be in charge of Verizon's overall security efforts, including physical security and cyber security within the company. He will report to Bill Barr, Verizon's executive vice president and general counsel. With more than 62 million customers and nearly 240,000 employees, Verizon is one of the largest carriers in the U.S.
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The cellphone company, which lost more than a million customers in the last five quarters, named Daniel R. Hesse as chief executive on Tuesday
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Former D.C. police chief Charles H. Ramsey is being considered for the police commissioner's job in Baltimore, officials said.
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The United States will assign an officer from the FBI to work at the office of the pan-European police office known as Europol, U.S. and European Union officials said Sept.
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Former New York City Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik, a fixture at Mayor Rudolph Giuliani&#39;s side during the Sept. 11 attacks, has been tapped to run the Department
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Nortel Networks, weighed down by an accounting scandal and weak growth, has appointed industry veteran Clent Richardson as chief marketing officer of the telecom networks giant.
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The executive in charge of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation's criminal investigations division will take over as chief security officer (CSO) of Verizon Communications early next year.
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Citigroup Inc  has named Don Callahan as chief administrative officer, according to an internal memo obtained by Reuters on Monday.
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By Michael S Rosenwald, Washington Post Staff Writer  Verizon Communications Inc.
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Dell Inc.  said on Friday  it hired the head of Motorola Inc.'s  mobile phone unit  to oversee a new global consumer division, making him the  second high-profile executive hired since Michael Dell returned  as CEO to the company he founded.
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EMC Corp., the data storage company, named a former executive from rival IBM Corp. on Friday as its chief technology officer.
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(InfoWorld) - VeriSign, a vendor of cybersecurity products and operator of the .com and .net top-level domains, has replaced CEO Stratton Sclavos with a member of its board of directors. William Roper Jr., a former executive vice president and chief financial officer at Science Applications International, will take over as VeriSign's president and CEO, the company said in a press release. Roper has served on the company's board of directors since November 2003. Roper also worked at Network Solutions, a domain name registrar, from 1995 to 2000. Sclavos, one of VeriSign's first employees, served as the company's president, chairman, and CEO before his resignation. The board also elected Edward Mueller chairman. Mueller, who joined VeriSign's board in March 2005, is the former CEO of Williams-Sonoma, a specialty retailer. The company is in the midst of restructuring, and Roper said in a statement he was pleased with the progress so far. VeriSign also reported that a review of the company's historical stock option grant practices by members of its board of directors is substantially completed. The review did not find intentional wrongdoing by any current member of senior management, including Sclavos, the company said. VeriSign, in November, announced it would have to restate as much as $250 million in earnings between 2001 and 2006 due to administrative mistakes. A VeriSign spokeswoman declined to talk about the reason for Sclavos' departure. "It definitely was not related" to the stock options probe, she said. Sclavos, who has worked at VeriSign for 12 years, said in a statement that he was "proud of my role in building VeriSign into the great company it has become." VeriSign's 2007 analyst day, previously scheduled for June 6 at VeriSign's corporate headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., has been postponed.
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Vodafone veteran John Townsend has been named CFO of Verizon Wireless. Townsend replaces outgoing CFO Andy Halford, who is moving to the post of chief financial director at Vodafone.
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In what will be one of Canada&#39;s largest white-collar crime investigations, the RCMP will assign as many as two dozen officers and forensic accountants to the criminal investigation of Nortel Networks Corp., a source familiar ...
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Verizon Wireless, the largest US wireless company, will expand its high-speed data service to 16 markets by the end of the year, the chairman of Verizon Communications Inc.
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(InfoWorld) - McAfeeÂ introduced its newest chief executiveÂ on Feb. 5 in its latest step to rebuild the firm's leadership ranks after aÂ 2006 stock options backdating probeÂ that led to the departure of several top officials. The security applications vendor named David DeWalt, 42, a former executive with storage giant EMC, as its latest president and CEO. DeWalt is the fourth individual appointed to the top job at McAfee in only the last six years. The new CEO steps into the role that was being occupied on an interim basis by McAfee board member Dale Fuller, who will step down from the job on April 1, 2007, but will retain his role as one of the firm's directors. DeWalt was also named to McAfee's board. Fuller, who had only joined McAfee's board in Jan. 2006, was called upon to steer the company when its president, Kevin Weiss, was fired in October 2006 after it was discovered that he had engaged in options backdating. The scandal -- through which executives illegally pre-dated their stock options to maximize personal gains -- also led to the resignation of longtime McAfee chairman and CEO George Samenuk. Charles Robel, the former COO at venture firm Hummer Winblad Venture Partners, signed on as Samenuk's replacement as McAfee chairman. DeWalt joins McAfee at a time when the company has reached a crossroads not only in terms of management, but also regarding its future. While the software vendor has long held a leading role in the desktop security market, trailing only Symantec in the massive antivirus segment, market forces have led company leaders to reshape the firm through a long series of mergers and acquisitions. Over the last several years in particular, McAfee has aggressively expanded its holdings in the market for compliance automation applications and services, which are used by businesses to stay in line with federal regulations, including the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. Perhaps taking aÂ page from Hewlett-Packard, which replaced colorful CEO Carly Fiorina with Mark Hurd -- a veteran of the stodgier data storage market at NCR -- McAfee clearly views DeWalt as someone who excels at management of both operations and business diversification. At EMC, DeWalt served as executive vice president and president of customer operations, including sales and services, and headed the company's software division, which the storage market leader has been pushing to grow aggressively. The executive came to EMC via its $1.7 billion buyout of Documentum in 2003, a deal which represented a strategic move by the firm to expand beyond its home turf in the storage space into the enterprise content management software arena. Immediately prior to the sale, as part of only a two-year tenure at Documentum, DeWalt is credited with leading the software company through 13 consecutive record quarters of financial performance, and he also worked previously at Oracle. "When I look at this company, I see no shortage of assets and a billion dollars in revenue as a pure play security vendor, which should give us a lot of potential opportunities," DeWalt said of McAfee "There's no debt, and the ledger is pretty positive. There were problems with the stock options, but the company has been getting stronger in a lot of intriguing areas such as compliance; we will be a top company worldwide when we come out at the other end." DeWalt specifically pointed to work done by CFO Eric Brown, who took on the additional responsibilities of COO in the wake of the stock scandal, as crucial to McAfee's recovery from the executive debacle.Â  The company said on March 2 that it plans to take an additional fourth-quarter stock options charge of roughly $1.8 million, lowering its net income by approximately $1.1 million, related to the backdating incident. The new CEO would not say whether or not McAfee will be more likely to become a buyer of smaller security companies or market itself as a potential acquisition to larger vendors but said that neither alternative is being ruled out. In the last year alone, a handful of security larger security technology makers have been swept up by larger infrastructure players, such as with IBM's acquisition of ISS for $1.3 billion. DeWalt's former employer EMC bought RSA Security for $2.1 billion in June 2006. While the executive said he was not planning to shop McAfee to potential buyers in his first days on the job, which officially begin on April 2, he said that the firm wouldn't rule out any possibilities until further exploring all of its options. DeWalt said he helped lead three different companies that have been acquired andÂ that he's completed nearly 50 similar transactions from the buyer side. "These are all possibilities, I'm no stranger to the consolidation game -- mergers and acquisitions are a way of life, and the security space is one of the last not to go through that type of change," said DeWalt. "We could be the consolidator, or some larger companies could look at us as a pure-play security provider that they need. It's a good position to be in." Industry watchers observed that DeWalt is taking over at a time when McAfee must make some tough decisions about its future. While rival Symantec moved heavily into storage technologies via its massive acquisition of Veritas in 2004, McAfee has yet to stake as serious a claim with its roadmap, said Andrew Jaquith, an analyst withÂ the Yankee Group. Pushing into the compliance sector is a good short-term bet for the firm, he said, but McAfee will need to define more far-ranging goals for where it aims to take its business tomorrow. "It all boils down to figuring out what McAfee wants to be when it grows up, even while it sharpens its existing message on anti-threat technologies," Jaquith said. "Symantec has clearly planted a flag in terms of becoming a broader systems management company; McAfee has stayed as more of a pure play -- they'll have to decide if they want to remain as a specialist, broaden through acquisitions, or become the security division of a bigger company." Jaquith, who said he isn't personally acquainted with DeWalt, indicated that the comparisons to HP's hiring of Hurd may be fair. He indicated that giving the impression of a more conservative leadership approach may have been part of the message the security company's directors wanted to send investors regarding the direction they would like to see the firm head in. If that is the case, said the analyst, it may have been a wise move considering the company's recent history of executive upheaval combined with ongoing shifts in the security market itself. "The hiring strikes as me as one way they may be looking to make security appear a little more boring, which is good, because boring means operations, and that's what customers are concerned about," Jaquith said.
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The new head of the security service MI5 is to be current deputy, Jonathan Evans, who will take over next month.