Amoroso Not the Retiring Sort

When most male executives retire from a long-time job, they brush up their golf game, plan exotic travel, tackle the "honey do list" or find a beach somewhere to just sit.

Ed Amoroso isn't doing any of those things. Instead, he's one of those guys who opens up his own company and proceeds to share a lifetime of knowledge through consulting and advising.

But even that description doesn't fit what the former AT&T chief security officer chose to do in the first six months after he was freed from day-to-day responsibilities at the major US operator.

He decided that, out-of-the-gate, he would tackle a major project, one he says often consumed 18 hours a day. That project was to put on paper, in three volumes, everything he thinks enterprises should be doing to become much better at preventing cybersecurity attacks and possibly even ward off the next wave of bad guy activity: You can read much more more about that in our new Prime Reading report. (See Amoroso Shares His Security Obsession.)

The details include not only the security architecture Amoroso thinks enterprises should adopt but also the 50 security control measures they should upgrade, complete with a list of possible vendor partners for each one.

The extraordinary part of this is that Amoroso isn't expecting a payday (at least, not right off the bat) for all this work. He's giving it away, starting today, on the website of his new company, TAG Cyber LLC -- you can download his report right here -- and on the websites of 48 vendors with which he's worked.

This is certainly going to make Amoroso a popular speaker, adviser and consultant -- all of which could pay off handsomely. But it's clear from a conservation I had with him that at least one primary motivation is his rock solid belief that things are going to get worse, cybersecurity-wise, if enterprises don't wake up and take notice of how things need to change.

And Amoroso knows what he's talking about, as he's proven many times in the recent past. (See AT&T's Amoroso: Taking Security to the Cloud, Iranian Hack of NY Dam Highlights Cyber Security Concerns, AT&T's Amoroso: Build Botnets of Security and AT&T's Amoroso: Be Proud of Playing Defense.)

By the way, if you are a network operator, service provider or enterprise, you're welcome to join us in New York on December 1 to hear Amoroso talk more about all of this (and again, that's all for free). Just go here to find out more and register.

You're welcome.

— Carol Wilson, Editor-at-Large, Light Reading