Abnormal Security Hires CrowdStrike Vet To Drive Federal Sector Push

James Yeager has joined the email security vendor as vice president of public sector sales, as Abnormal looks to bring its AI-driven approach to more federal customers.

Abnormal Security has hired a longtime public sector business leader for prominent cybersecurity vendors, James Yeager, to head a major expansion push with federal government customers for the AI-driven email security platform, the company said.

Yeager has joined Abnormal as vice president of public sector sales following seven years in the equivalent role at cybersecurity giant CrowdStrike, the vendor announced Tuesday.

At one top solution and service provider partner of Abnormal, Blackwood, an executive told CRN that the move to bring Yeager aboard is a big win for the email security vendor and its partners. For Abnormal, the hire represents “a huge investment into coming in the space,” said Ryan Morris, president of Annapolis, Md.-based Blackwood.

When vendors are looking to serve public sector customers, “a red flag for me is always when they try to attack it but they don't make the investment in someone that is tenured and really understands the space. They're just not going to be successful,” Morris said. Abnormal, however, is proving its commitment to federal by bringing in Yeager — “an industry veteran who has done it multiple times before,” Morris said.

Prior to joining CrowdStrike in 2017, Yeager held leadership roles in federal sales at well-known cybersecurity vendors including Tanium and McAfee.

In an interview, Yeager said that federal agencies are highly interested in modernizing their email security programs right now as phishing and social engineering attacks continue to pose a massive threat.

“What they've got today is rather inadequate,” he said. “Technology has arrived to overcome those barriers, and they want to hear about it.”

Founded in 2018 by veterans of companies including Twitter and Google, Abnormal Security has become a major force in email security thanks to its platform powered by behavioral AI technologies.

The hire of Yeager follows Abnormal’s disclosure in August that it had surpassed $100 million in annual recurring revenue and has aspirations to go public in the future. The move also comes after Abnormal’s hire of a longtime cybersecurity and channel industry executive, Jonathan Corini, as its new channel chief in January.

In the commercial sector, organizations have started gravitating to Abnormal in a major way, with 15 percent of Fortune 100 companies now using the company’s platform, Yeager noted.

‘Timing Is Right’

According to Blackwood’s Morris, “the timing is right” for Abnormal to pursue the federal space.

“We just started seeing a pretty significant amount of our commercial customers move [to Abnormal] in Q4 of last year. And now we're trying to get some of our federal customers to lean in,” he said.

Yeager will play a pivotal role for Abnormal because among the thousands of cybersecurity vendors in the U.S., “all of them would love to do business in fed — and very few actually understand what it takes to do that,” Morris said. “Good intentions aren't enough when you want to go to market and successfully partner with the federal government.”

Morris added that Blackwood itself uses Abnormal’s platform for email security. The product reduces complexity and works well with Microsoft 365, which is widely used in both the federal and commericial sectors, in additon to improving protection of inboxes with AI, he noted.

Ultimately, Morris said that with attackers using AI to enhance their email-based attacks, “we have to use that same technology on the defensive side as well.”