Alex Stamos, the chief information security officer at Facebook, plans to leave the company in August amid turmoil and disputes at the top levels of the company over disclosing details in nation-state abuse of the social media platform as well as other issues, according to a report in The New York Times.

In December, Stamos' daily duties were assigned to other Facebook managers, and his security team of 120 is now down to three people. The security team was moved to the product and infrastructure divisions, the report said. Stamos, the former CISO at Yahoo, had pressed Facebook to be more open about Russian interference with its social media platform and had advocated for restructuring at the company to tackle security and privacy issues - but he met resistence internally.

He tweeted yesterday after The Times story published:

"To be clear, the security team has never been prevented or discouraged from investigating any Russian activity by any executives."

And:

"Despite the rumors, I'm still fully engaged with my work at Facebook. It's true that my role did change. I'm currently spending more time exploring emerging security risks and working on election security."

Read the full article here.

Join Dark Reading LIVE for two cybersecurity summits at Interop ITX. Learn from the industry’s most knowledgeable IT security experts. Check out the security track here.