Overview

John McClurg is an American security and counterintelligence professional. He spent his early career with the US government, serving as both a supervisory special agent and branch chief for the FBI as well as a deputy branch chief for the CIA. In these roles, McClurg was involved in the capturing of both Kevin Poulsen and Harold James Nicholson. He is currently BlackBerry’s CISO where he leads all aspects of BlackBerry’s Information Security Programme globally.

McClurg began his career working for the FBI where he co-created what became the National Infrastructure Protection Center at the Department of Homeland Security. McClurg held a number of roles within the Bureau, including Supervisory Special Agent and CI-Cyber Branch Chief where he served on one of the US’s first Joint Terrorism Task Forces. During his tenure he focused on the problem of increasing the FBI’s technical sophistication and ability to implement a wide-range of information solutions in response to emerging cyber and physical threats to the National Information Infrastructure.

Following his public service, he served as the vice president for security at Lucent Technologies/Bell Laboratories in the mid-2000s where he integrated all aspects of full-spectrum (cyber and physical) security services and risk mitigation across 11 Business Units in 90 countries. He later became the vice president and chief security officer of Global Security at Honeywell, where he developed strategic focus and tactical operations for cyber and physical security. He was also working on an early Advanced Persistent Threat program, before moving to Dell Inc in 2011, where he became the vice president and chief security officer of Dell’s Global Security Organization. At Dell he developed what he called the Business Assurance Program, which was designed to determine the likelihood of a trusted insider employee or worker of acting against their interests—such as engaging in spying.