As its battle with the FBI continues, Apple has reportedly hired a former Amazon executive to oversee its corporate digital defenses, according to Reuters. George Stathakopoulos was vice president of information security at Amazon for 6 years and was a general manager at Microsoft for 10 years before joining Amazon. At Apple, Stathakopoulos will report to CFO Luca Maestri.
Reporting to Maestri, Stathakopoulos will take the task of protecting corporate assets, such as confidential software, product, and design information. He will also be helping in protecting data about customers.
At Amazon, Stathakopoulos was responsible for programs that protected Amazon and Amazon customers, as well as the company’s IT infrastructure. From Stathakopoulos’ LinkedIn:
Responsible for the programs that protect Amazon and its customers, as well as directing the company’s IT infrastructure and other technology resources.
Prior to joining Amazon, George led Microsoft’s global Microsoft Security Response Center and Global Security Strategy & Diplomacy teams responsible for proactively detecting and responding to threats, and partnering with governments on technical and policy security issues.
While Apple has not commented on the hire, Reuters says that when a call was placed to Apple asking to speak to Stathakopoulos, an Apple employee connected them to a person who said “George’s office.”
Stathakopoulos has reportedly been at Apple for roughly a week. It’s an investing hire for Apple, especially with its ongoing case with the FBI over unlocking the iPhone 5c used by one of the San Bernardino gunmen. The hire highlights Apple’s increasing focus on security. Last month, the company hired the developer behind Edward Snowden’s recommended chat app, while Apple acquired security consultancy company LegbaCore in November.
Apple is set to face the FBI in court on March 22nd over its refusal to unlock an iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino. The hearing is one day after Apple plans to unveil new products at a press event. Both the FBI and Apple have recently shared new filings concerting the case.
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Is this the same Apple that is talking about passing all our iCloud data over to Google ?
I have no need for a level of security that protects terrorists or child molesters from the FBI – but I do need for my personal data not to be passed to a global mega-corporation which makes it’s living by leveraging the personal information of millions of people.
Alongside recent security failings, this continues to reinforce the perception that Apple has become distracted in terms of genuine security threats to normal customers.
From Apple’s iOS Security White Paper (Sept. 2015), page 41 iCloud: “Each file is broken into chunks and encrypted by iCloud using AES-128 and a key derived from each chunk’s contents that utilizes SHA-256. The keys, and the fille’s metadata, are stored by Apple in the user’s iCloud account. The encrypted chunks of the file are stored, without any user-identifying information, using third-party storage services, such as Amazon S3 and Windows Azure.”
As far as I understand this, Apple stores the encryption keys in its own data centers and sends the encrypted data to Google or whatever. This means they have no access to your data, since it’s just a pile of garbage data to them.
You really don’t understand anything do you? Encryption is important to everybody. If you don’t think is crucial, then remove all the locks on you house, your cars, and put your password information to all your personal accounts on a big sign everywhere. That’s where you are without encryption. Terrorists WILL use encryption. Making ours weaker won’t help us. This would be similar to saying that we shouldn’t be interested in guns because the terrorists use them to kill people, so we should force our own people to use significantly weaker guns. Encryption is not only a tool, but a weapon of defense for everybody. You nor the FBI would ever want a backdoor to their private servers where national security information is at stake.
SERIOUSLY?!?!??!??! So we can DOWNGRADE Apples #1 reason for having Apple devices, Apple Security?!?! Cuz Microsoft is so secure???? Tim is rolling over in his GRAVE!
Tim isn’t dead for a start, secondly, did you read the earlier post? The encryption keys are stored at Apple, chunks of data is all the storage provider sees. So security is still number one!
Man from microsoft taking care about apple security? Are you kidding me?