Shifting sands and making waves: July in the tech C-suite

Summer months are known for vacations and professional inertia—but for the tech C-suite, the work, and the executive back and forth, continues.

Coinbase snags Unit 42’s Michael Sikorski as CISO

Cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase hired former Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 CTO Michael Sikoski as CISO in July, a hire aimed at shoring up the company’s cybersecurity bench.

Sikorski spent four years at Unit 42 as CTO. That position followed a year at Mandiant in research and development; prior to that, he worked at FireEye, ending with a year as VP of the FLARE team, a research division. He also had earlier stints at the NSA and MIT.

At Coinbase, Sikorski said in a LinkedIn post, he will help “secure the future of financial services, disrupt threat actors, and scale a highly resilient world-class security architecture.”

“As the threat landscape evolves toward increasingly complex, decentralized ecosystems with AI-enabled attackers, it’s time to step out of the advisory seat and take on this challenge directly,” Sikorski wrote.

FTC CIO leaves after six years

It’s time for turnover at one of the federal government’s most venerable institutions—longtime FTC CIO Mark Gray has stepped down, the agency told IT Brew in an email. Marco Peraza is acting CIO.

Gray joined the FTC in 2020 after a 26-year career in the Army, starting as deputy CIO before moving to the main job three years ago.

CompTIA goes up the hill for new CEO

CompTIA, meet your new CEO—Sean Ryan.

Ryan, an industry veteran who was most recently president of McGraw-Hill for six years, joins the certification and research company at a moment of opportunity and apprehension for the tech industry—and a need for CompTIA’s training and certifications.

At CompTIA, Ryan intends to focus on (and this will be no surprise to anyone who’s been following IT Brew for the last four years) AI’s role in the tech industry.

“CompTIA has spent decades building the infrastructure to train people and independently verify their competence through performance-based credentialing that employers trust,” Ryan said in a statement. “That foundation, combined with a clear focus on AI skills and certifications, puts us in a unique position to turn AI ambition into demonstrated, credentialed capability.”