Mario Villatoro

Mario Villatoro is the Chief Information Security Officer of Jamf, a role he reached after being promoted from Senior Director of Information Security.

Career path

Before joining Jamf, Villatoro served as Director of Microsoft's Global Security Operations.
He also held the position of Vice President and Chief Information Security Officer at The Michaels Companies.
Earlier in his career he held senior leadership roles at Tenet Healthcare, Parsons Corporation, Verizon, and Nokia.
He joined Jamf as Senior Director of Information Security before being promoted to Vice President and Chief Information Security Officer.
Villatoro holds a Master of Science degree in Information Security from WGU Texas and maintains several security industry certifications.

Remit and public commentary

In his Jamf role he brings more than 15 years of global security leadership experience from Fortune 500 companies, with a focus on security strategy, operations, risk management and compliance.
He has written about Cybersecurity Awareness Month from a practitioner's point of view, examining how organizations are progressing on their cybersecurity practice. Discussing how artificial intelligence is reshaping social engineering, Villatoro said the old advice to watch for grammatical errors or out-of-context emails no longer applies because attackers can build convincing phishing kits within minutes. He has described AI as a potential force multiplier for defenders while insisting that security teams first get operational basics right, including tested backups.

"When folks tell me they haven’t tested their backups in two years, imagine getting hit tomorrow - and then telling your CIO, ‘We’ll just restore from backup,’ and then you realize nothing’s there." (S5.39)

He has argued that identity should be treated as a core security function rather than merely an IT provisioning task. Villatoro has also said that network segmentation, strong visibility, and continuous access validation are the mechanisms that keep compromised credentials or rogue autonomous agents from moving freely across a network. He advises CISOs to filter new security tools by whether they measurably mitigate a specific risk and change an attacker's actual leverage over the following 12 to 18 months. Villatoro delivered the talk AI-Powered Threats Meet Zero Trust: Building Resilient Defenses at an ISC2 event on October 29, 2025. He is based in the Greater Seattle Area and is described as a regular speaker at cybersecurity conferences and industry panels.