The Department of Homeland Security has announced two senior cybersecurity appointments.
David Larrimore has been named chief technology officer for DHS, a role he previously held at Immigration and Customs Enforcement between 2016 and 2019. Between federal appointments, Larrimore was lead solution engineer at Salesforce.
DHS also announced Robert Costello has stepped into the role of chief information officer at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. Costello previously spent nine years at U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
“Here we have a former Salesforce executive and a border security professional. I’m inclined to approve such cross-disciplinary promotions, because cyber defense is no longer a purely technical challenge. It’s a pervasive national and economic security concern,” said Hitesh Sheth, president and chief operating officer at cybersecurity company Vectra.
Prior to his move to ICE, Larrimore was a cloud strategist at the Agriculture Department and an IT manager at the General Services Administration.
“Larrimore and Costello’s appointments indicate that government is rethinking the type of talent it’s bringing in to help wrangle the country’s cybersecurity problem,” said Bill O’Neill, vice president of public sector at cloud identity security solutions provider ThycoticCentrify.
