Facebook CISO Alex Stamos quits for post in academia - and the company has no plans to replace him

Stamos quits Facebook to teach information security to Stanford students

Facebook's highly regarded chief information security officer, Alex Stamos, has announced that he is quitting to take up a new role in academia. And Facebook isn't planning to replace him.

Stamos announced the news over Twitter and Facebook yesterday evening.

Naturally, Stamos wrote about how "proud" he had been to work with "some of the most skilled and dedicated security professionals in the world" in "one of the most difficult threat environments faced by any technology company".

He added that during his time, the company had built "new protections around user data" and improved "the security of products used by billions". It had also rolled-out new encryption and privacy protections "at unprecedented scale" and studied and reacted "to new classes of abuse by the world's most advanced adversaries".

He continued: "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. I have had the pleasure of lecturing at Stanford for several years, and now I will have the honour of guiding new generations of students as an Adjunct Professor at the Freeman-Spogli Institute for International Studies.

"I will also continue my work understanding and preventing the misuse of technology as a Cyber Initiative Fellow, a William J. Perry Fellow in International Security and a Visiting Scholar at the Hoover Institution.

"This fall, I am very excited to launch a course teaching hands-on offensive and defensive techniques and to contribute to the new cybersecurity master's specialty at FSI. I am also looking forward to other opportunities to contribute to Stanford's focus on ethically designing and implementing new technologies."

Stamos's last day at Facebook will be 17 August.

Stamos joined Facebook from Yahoo in 2015, after having been kept in the dark over various security breaches in 2012 and 2014, having only joined Yahoo from Artemis Internet the year before.

While at Facebook, his role as CISO was somewhat overshadowed by a series of controversies over third-party access to user data and ‘fake news'. His departure was planned earlier this year, though, before the controversies surrounding Cambridge Analytica's and other organisations' access to personal data of Facebook users was exposed.

Prior to Yahoo, he had co-founded a security consutling firm called iSEC Partners and during his career has been called as an expert witness in a number of cases, including Google in a case involving Google Street View, the Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF) in a case against Sony BMG and for hacker George Holtz and activist Aaron Swartz.