A senior federal cybersecurity official who left her post in November will join Google as a senior executive next month, adding to the list of federal employees who have jumped to the search giant.
Jeanette Manfra, the former assistant director for cybersecurity for the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, will become global director of security and compliance for Google Cloud in January, Google confirmed to the Washington Examiner Thursday.
Manfra is the latest in a string of senior DHS cyber officials who have departed for Google in the last few years. Kate Charlet left her position over cyber policy at the Pentagon in July 2017 and then became Google’s director for data governance in September of this year. Daniel Prieto left his position as cybersecurity policy director with the White House National Security Council in January 2017 and later joined Google’s Cloud project.
A Google spokeswoman said in a statement Manfra will work on a new project within Google Cloud on Jan. 6. “She will lend her considerable experience in cybersecurity toward helping our customers, particularly those in regulated industries, build and maintain the highest levels of security and trust into their technical infrastructure and services,” the spokeswoman said.
Manfra was at DHS for 12 years and most recently was the 240,000-person department’s point person for securing the country’s critical infrastructure from cyber threats, a government profile states. She was also director for critical infrastructure cybersecurity on the White House’s National Security Council.
Google owns the Chrome web browser, YouTube video site, Android, and more than a dozen other companies.
A Wall Street Journal report published in November brought criticism from lawmakers, including Minnesota Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar, for how the company allowed 150 employees access to health data from tens of millions of people whose information was transferred into Google’s systems as part of a deal with Ascension.
