Ride the Lightning

Security Superstar Bruce Schneier is Leaving IBM

July 3, 2019

I truly love quoting Bruce Schneier in CLEs – he is blunt and always (a la My Cousin Vinny) balls-on accurate. Almost a demigod in the cybersecurity field, Schneier has said he'll step down as a "special advisor" to IBM's security business to, in part, focus his time on teaching the next generation of security pros. That gives me as much comfort as anything I've heard recently.

According to an article in The Register, Schneier said he also wanted to focus on work with nonprofit projects including Tor and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), where he is a board member. Another "whoop" for that decision.

The cryptographer, formerly BT's chief security technology officer, has been writing about security since 1998 and has produced more than a dozen books, as well as hundreds of articles, essays and academic papers.

Schneier started working at IBM in 2016 after Big Blue snapped up his startup, Resilient Systems (previously called Co3), where he served as CTO, for a rumored $100m. This, I assume, allows him to do whatever the heck he wants. Resilient developed an incident-response platform, which was eventually integrated with IBM's Security Event and Incident Management (SEIM) system, called QRadar.

The partnership started well enough. "Everything I've seen so far indicates that this will be a good home for me. They know what they're getting, and they're still keeping me on. I have no intention of changing what I write about or speak about – or to whom," Schneier said at the time. Remember my comment about bluntness? There you have it.

Three years later, he's discarded his blue IBM blazer. By way of comparison, Schneier spent seven years as the CTO of another startup, Counterpane Internet Security. When Counterpane was acquired by BT, he spent another seven years as its security expert.

Schneier describes himself as a public-interest technologist – which might explain why he won't work for a global corporations past his contract obligations.

"I will continue to write and speak, and do the occasional consulting job," he said of his future plans. "I will continue to teach at the Harvard Kennedy School. I will continue to serve on boards for organizations I believe in: EFF, Access Now, Tor, EPIC, Verified Voting. And I will increasingly be an advocate for public-interest technology."

The Register post finished with a quote from the website SchneierFacts, which compares him to Chuck Norris: "Bruce Schneier only smiles when he finds an unbreakable cryptosystem. Of course, Bruce Schneier never smiles." Love that quote.

Glad to have one of the best of the best working full-time as a public-interest technologist!

Sharon D. Nelson, Esq., President, Sensei Enterprises, Inc.
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