Intel confirmed to the CRN website that Leslie Culbertson, at the top of the Product Assurance and Security Group since February 2018, she retired after 41 years of honorable service. Culbertson had been entrusted with the immediate response after the discovery of the Specter and Meltdown vulnerabilities. A role that was certainly not easy, which Culbertson managed to manage rather well, bringing the issue of security back to Intel's priorities.
The company is discounting and will still be vulnerable for some time to the existence of vulnerabilities in older architectures, but in these two and a half years there has undoubtedly been a rapid response to the new leaks that have emerged and the new architectures have proved unscathed to these problems ( fingers crossed!).
Joshua Walden, 37, who has been working in the division since 2018, took over Culbertson's place in March and reports directly to Murthy Renduchintala, Chief Engineering Officer of Technology, Systems Architecture and Client Group. The Product Assurance and Security Group, IPAS for short, represents the "mission control" for the security issues of all Intel products, not just the CPUs.
Since 2018 the division has centralized the company's best talents to have a long-term approach in terms of safety, with a look "to the panorama of evolving threats and to the continuous improvement of product safety in the years to come". Intel has also strengthened collaboration with academic institutions by supporting targeted vulnerability research so that they can be discovered before some attackers do.