Michael Coates

Michael Coates has been appointed Chief Information Security Officer of the Solana Foundation, the organization behind the Solana blockchain network.

Career path

SecurityWeek's industry-moves column reports that Coates previously served as CISO at Twitter, now known as X, led security at Mozilla, and worked in product security at Shape Security, and that he was board chairman at the OWASP Foundation.

An RSA Conference speaker biography, published while Coates was building his own company, gives more detail on that earlier record: it describes him as having spent 15 years in information security in roles including CISO of Twitter, Head of Security of Mozilla and Chairman of OWASP, and says he was at the time co-founder and CEO of Altitude Networks, a company providing a solution to prevent data theft and loss in cloud collaboration systems. Neither source reviewed states what Coates did in the period between his time at Altitude Networks and his appointment at the Solana Foundation, or gives his educational background.

Scope of the new role

Across both sources, his record spans consumer social media, a nonprofit software-security standards body, an enterprise browser maker, and an application-security vendor, before this move into a foundation built around a public blockchain network.

That RSA Conference page is dated to 2020 and was not updated for this appointment, so it documents his record only up to his time as co-founder and CEO of Altitude Networks and says nothing about what he did in the years between that venture and his hire at the Solana Foundation. SecurityWeek's own coverage likewise stops at a single sentence naming his prior employers, without describing his specific mandate, reporting line, or start date at the foundation.