ASU Wins CSO50 Award

Arizona State University was recognized as a winner during the 6th annual CSO50 Awards, an event that recognizes outstanding efforts of organizations’ security leaders and innovation initiators. A panel of security experts including practitioners, academics and Chief Security Officers (CSOs) selected the honorees based on innovation and business value.

ASU’s spam and phishing scheme detection methods were the highlight of the University’s award, which Martin Idasazk, Lead Security Architect, spoke about at the conference this week. With over 120,000 students across the country and around the world, and thousands of faculty and staff, ASU has a large technology footprint and a responsibility to maintain a secure information technology ecosystem spanning multiple networks, cloud environments, websites, and applications.

The team that spearheaded the award winning effort included: ASU’s Chief Information Security Officer, Tina Thorstenson, and a team of expert architects and analysts including TJ Witucky, Chris Kurtz, Sean Ganser, Michael Brown, and Martin Idaszak.

“The university turned to an innovative blend of enterprise systems and security tools including Splunk to rapidly detect and respond to millions of spam and phishing messages,” Thorstenson says, in addition to many more security-related events, that ASU is faced with annually.

ASU was honored alongside other organizations such as American Express, Comcast, The Home Depot, and the University of California at the CSO50 Conference in Scottsdale in February. ASU will continue to introduce innovative solutions to meet the increasing cyber threats and seek to maintain an efficient and safe technological environment for everyone in the university community.

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