Zoom hires Jason Lee from Salesforce to serve as new CISO

June 24, 2020

Jason Lee, Zoom CISO

Image via LinkedIn

Video conferencing software company Zoom announced today it hired a new Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) in Jason Lee, who, until recently, served as Salesforce’s Senior Vice President of Security Operations.

Zoom said Lee will start in his new role at the company starting next week, on June 29, where he will report to Aparna Bawa, Zoom’s Chief Operating Officer.

Lee is a veteran of the cyber-security industry, having served in information security and management roles for more than 20 years.

Between September 2017 and June 2020, Lee served as Salesforce Vice President of Security Operations where he managed a team of more than 300 security professionals.

At Salesforce, Lee was in charge of managing the security of Salesforce’s entire IT infrastructure, but also incident response, threat intel gathering, data protection operations, vulnerability management, intrusion detection, identity and access management, and Salesforce’s offensive security team.

Prior to his role as Salesforce security kingpin, Lee also worked 15 years at Microsoft in various roles, and at one point, held the position of Principal Director of Security Engineering for the Windows and Devices division, one of Microsoft’s most important departments.

Here was tasked with protecting the online services of Windows Update, XBOX Live, and the Microsoft online store.

Zoom readying to exit its feature freeze period

Lee’s hiring comes as Zoom is readying to exit its “feature freeze period.” After the discovery and disclosure of several security issues with Zoom’s service, on April 1, the company paused development on all new features to focus solely on security and privacy-related improvements and bug fixes.

The company is going to exit this freeze on July 1, next week.

During this time, the company delivered on its promise and bolstered the Zoom app’s security by adding support for encrypted communications, adding features to report abusive users, adding features to give room administrators more control over their meetings, enabled waiting rooms, added stronger room password protections, and many others.

During its feature freeze period, Zoom also hired former Facebook CISO Alex Stamos as an external security consultant to guide the company during this period until they hired a full-time CISO.

The Zoom service saw tremendous growth during the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak, having jumped from 10 million daily users in December 2019 to more than 300 million daily users today.