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WeWork is bringing on the person formerly responsible for keeping the U.S. president’s digital devices safe from cyber threats to fill its first chief security officer role.
Cory Louie, who served for two years as chief information security officer for the White House’s Executive Office, will be overseeing both digital and physical security for WeWork’s nearly 250,000 members. Louie, who was appointed to head up White House information security by President Obama in 2015, resigned last March, shortly after Trump took office.
Most recently, Louie worked as chief information security officer at Planned Parenthood. He’s previously held security and safety leadership roles at Dropbox and Google, and before that was in the Secret Service for five years, where he said he cut his teeth as one of the first electronic crime special agents.
“I get pinged about opportunities and normally I ignore them, but this one sounded interesting,” said Louie. “I spoke with [CEO Adam Neumann] and he helped me see the light and educate me on how WeWork is more than a real estate company, that there’s a lot of technology behind what they do.”
The chief security officer is a new role for the rapidly growing coworking company. The move comes at a time when many major names in tech — such as Facebook and Twitter — are facing major issues over privacy and security breaches.
“With all of this stuff in the press right now, it’s important to learn what the frontier looks like and keep staying ahead of it,” said Shiva Rajaraman, WeWork’s chief product officer, who Louie will report to. “We place a focus on how security works when you have physical space and software deployed that people are using to work,” said Rajaraman.
Part of Louie’s task will be combining and growing both the digital and physical security teams at WeWork, which are currently separate.
Rajaraman also confirmed WeWork is exploring providing “security as as service,” meaning it could add custom security features for its fast-growing big-business enterprise customers, who currently make up 23 percent of membership.
Louie officially began last Monday, May 1, but the move will be announced internally today.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
