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Security and systems management startup Tanium has hired David Damato as its first chief security officer.
Damato is a former managing director at FireEye and led that company’s investigation into the hacking attack earlier this year on insurer Anthem Health. He has participated in at least 100 more investigations as part of FireEye’s incident response division Mandiant. He may have worked on other Mandiant/FireEye investigations, like the hack of Sony Pictures Entertainment by North Korea, but wouldn’t say for sure.
Tanium is the fast-growing startup backed by venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz that specializes in managing large-scale networks of computers, servers and other devices that live on a corporate network. IT pros sometimes refer to these devices collectively as “endpoints.”
Regardless of the size of the network and how widely it’s distributed around the globe, the Tanium software can execute a super-fast 15-second check on the status of that endpoint and find out quickly what kind of software it has running on it, whether or not its operating system has been updated recently and other routine matters. When an IT manager sees something going on with that endpoint that shouldn’t be, he or she can shut it down.
The software can also run a software update across thousands of machines at once.
In an interview, Damato said his role at Tanium will be to apply his experience in leading security investigations and apply it to Tanium’s products. “A lot of the incidents I worked on, it took hours or days to respond to a breach once it had been discovered,” he said. “Meanwhile, the hackers were able to move around all over the environment. One of the most important things you can do when you know there’s been a breach is to respond within a quick time frame.”
Andreessen Horowitz has invested a combined $142 million in Tanium, including a $52 million round at a valuation of $1.75 billion disclosed in March. The firm is Tanium’s only outside investor. Last year it invested $90 million.
Tanium will also today announce that it has expanded its operations with an office in Washington, D.C. It does a fair amount of business with federal government agencies, including several branches of the U.S. Department of Defense, and has recently opened offices in London and hired executives to run operations in Sydney and Tokyo.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
