Leadership, Cyber veterans, Incident response
The professional career of Maggie Amato, business information security officer of Salesforce, looked very different in 2017.
After helping to stand up a cybersecurity coordination center in the Department of Health and Human Services that was widely credited with (among other things) minimizing the impact of the WannaCry ransomware cyberattack on the U.S. health sector, she and then-HHS Deputy Chief Information Security Officer Leo Scanlan were reassigned. A month later, she resigned. The rumor mill circulated stories of mismanagement, contractor favoritism, and ineptitude.
Amato experienced the worst of it.
“Everything in the book was said. I had ethics issues. I was sleeping with people that I didn't even know,” she recalled, speaking for the first time publicly about the ordeal with SC Media. “I truly do believe that if I weren't a female running the program, things would've been very, very different.”
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SC Media detailed the full scope of Amato’s ordeal in a separate report that you can read here. But it’s difficult to write a profile about this security leader without highlighting what she experienced at the hand of government bureaucracy.
Amato and Scanlan were never provided an explanation for why they were reassigned — told of internal investigations tied to claims in an anonymous letter of ethical issues and mismanagement, but given no evidence. Both learned...
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