David Sønstebø, the founder of IOTA, announced today that the project has hired Andrea Villa, a prominent figure in cloud computing, to boost its security team. In the announcement, Sønstebø highlights the skills that make Villa a clear fit within the IOTA core team.

“Andrea’s impressive resume made it very easy to invite him on board the IOTA Foundation to leverage his skills and experience, particularly in regards to security. Given that IOTA has properties that make it ideal as a counter measurement to a lot of hacks, Andrea’s background is a perfect fit to further drive this aspect of the project. Give him a warm welcome!”

Villa had formerly cofounded Eureka, a platform for running computational science on the cloud, where he served as CTO. Villa has a substantial resume starting from an early age. He is self-taught computer hacker who has served as a cloud architect and a senior security consultant for several renowned clients around the world.

Regarding IOTA, Andrea said, “As a fast-paced and bleeding edge tech organization, I believe IOTA faces several security challenges in terms of protocol, implementation, operations, and infrastructure that require pro-active scrutiny and solving. The Tangle technology may very well constitute the future foundation of a large variety of applications, being part of the effort to deliver a usable and secure IOTA to the general public is both challenging and exciting.”

Most people involved in the IOTA ecosystem seem excited about the news, with many on IOTA’s subreddit asking why the hire wasn’t done much earlier.