The social media sensation coming out of China will further expand its growing Irish operations with a highly specialised cybersecurity team.
TikTok is establishing a specialised Fusion Centre in Dublin, creating more than 50 new jobs. This centre will be part of the social video platform’s efforts to provide round-the-clock cybersecurity functions around the world.
TikTok currently drives global cybersecurity out of a centre in Washington, DC. Dublin will be its first regional Fusion Centre, marking a starting point for a worldwide network that will monitor, respond to and investigate cyberthreats and critical incidents in real time.
The Dublin centre in particular will focus on on-platform threat discovery, next-generation cyberthreat monitoring and digital crime investigations.
Jobs at the Dublin site will be highly specialised roles in security, privacy and policy. Tánaiste Leo Varadkar, TD, revealed that more than 50 new jobs will be created at the centre.
“This announcement underlines the company’s continued commitment to our country and will allow it to continue to benefit from our rich and highly skilled talent pool,” he said.
Teams at the TikTok Dublin Fusion Centre will work across business operations, trust assurance, incident response, digital crimes, converged security, governance, risk and compliance.
TikTok’s global chief security officer, Roland Cloutier, said the new roles will require “diverse skillsets” and be expected to use common tools and processes to tackle cybersecurity challenges. These include advanced automation tools, detection and response controls and analytics dashboards.
In a recent interview, Cloutier described TikTok’s “defence in depth model”, which uses machine learning and automated monitoring tools to track user behaviour for anomalies or inauthenticity, and takes a privacy-first approach to the product development life cycle.
“We have a large and fast-growing team of security practitioners around the world, including our global cyber defence, privacy operations and product security programmes and we plan to nearly double that number by the end of 2021,” he told Siliconrepublic.com in April.
Globally, the Fusion Centres will be led out of Washington by global head of threat management and incident response, Andrew Bonillo, who has more than two decades’ experience in law enforcement and cybersecurity.
Recent appointment Carlos Becerra will be business partner lead for the team in Dublin. Becerra has also been in the tech industry for more than 20 years, holding cybersecurity roles at IBM, EA, Microsoft and Workday.
TikTok in Ireland
As TikTok has reached more than 100m monthly active users across Europe, Ireland has become a critical European hub for the company.
The social media platform, owned by Chinese tech giant ByteDance, recently selected The Sorting Office in Dublin for its new office base.
Ireland was also selected as the location for TikTok’s first data centre in Europe, which is expected to be operational by early 2022. This announcement came just after the Dublin team was given responsibility for privacy oversight of all European users.
This year, TikTok announced that its new European Transparency and Accountability Centre would also be located in Ireland. It was expected that the company’s headcount in the country would reach 1,000 by early 2021.
The growing footprint of TikTok in Ireland has been supported by the Government through IDA Ireland.
“TikTok’s rapid expansion in Ireland has established it as a vital centre for its European and global operations as well as a substantial employer,” said IDA CEO Martin Shanahan.
“The additional high-value jobs being created, apart from the benefit to our economy, will build on Ireland’s expertise in the field of global trust assurance, security threat management, compliance and governance in an increasingly digitised and vigorous technology sector.”
