Bank of America has appointed Patrick Gorman chief information security officer, poaching him from Booz Allen Hamilton, the consultancy it recently brought in to help prepare for an expected assault from WikiLeaks.
Reporting to chief technology officer Marc Gordon and based in Washington DC, Gorman will be responsible for the bank's information security strategy, policy and programme.
The 25 year technology veteran is a former associate director of National Intelligence and CIO for the US Director of National Intelligence. He rejoined Booz Allen Hamilton around two years ago as senior executive advisor for cybersecurity and advanced analytics.
BofA is widely understood to be the bank that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange claims to have a "megaleak" of internal documents on. The bank has taken the threat seriously, setting up a war room run by chief risk officer Bruce Thompson and calling in Gorman's old employer Booz Allen Hamilton.
BofA has suffered a number of outages recently, leading to speculation that it may have been the victim of organised cyber-attacks by WikiLeaks supporters. The bank has consistently refuted the gossip as unfounded.