Abnormal Security is increasing its investment in the federal sector and has named James Yeager vice president of public sector sales.
Yeager, with over 25 years of experience supporting government customers in modernizing their cybersecurity infrastructure, will lead Abnormal’s public sector strategy. His focus will be on enabling federal agencies to use the company’s cloud email security platform to achieve specific near-term goals.
The shift from on-premise to cloud-based email systems in the public sector makes it an attractive and vulnerable target for nation-state threat actors, Yeager said.
“Recent incidents like the breach of government agency email accounts by Chinese hackers last summer underscore just how pervasive and sophisticated these email attacks are becoming,” he said. “Coming into the Abnormal, my priority will be to expand our public sector sales strategy in an effort to protect even more government customers against this increasing adversary activity.”
Recent attacks have targeted the public sector, notably last year’s breach by Chinese hackers of federal employees’ email accounts, resulting in over 60,000 stolen emails from multiple agencies, according to the company. As agencies move to cloud-based email, these email attacks are increasingly successful, rendering legacy email security solutions ineffective. Innovative cloud-based technologies are essential to combat these threats.
“One of the key objectives that I’ll be working on with my team as we look to expand into the federal sector will be to secure our FedRAMP authorization,” Yeager said. “A significant amount of my energy right now is focused on acquiring a committed agency sponsor to partner with Abnormal as we embark upon this journey. This is one of the most critical initial steps for Abnormal as we move toward achieving the highly sought after FedRAMP Authorized designation.”
Yeager will also work with his team to scale public sector operations to respond to the considerable demand they’re already seeing from federal organizations.
Before joining Abnormal, Yeager was the vice president of public sector at CrowdStrike, helping the company reach FedRAMP High and Defense Department IL5 authorization. He also helped establish CrowdStrike Falcon as the standard for endpoint security across the public sector.
Yeager also served as the director of federal sales at Tanium and as the regional director of federal civilian sales at McAfee.
Abnormal currently secures over 1.5 million mailboxes for state and local governments and aims to expand this protection to federal agencies, helping them defend against complex email attacks.