A group of top security officers from some of the industry's largest companies will announce Wednesday that they are banding together to form a new global security think tank.

The Global CSO Council includes Howard Schmidt, chief information security officer at eBay Inc. and the former top cybersecurity adviser to the president; Mary Ann Davidson, CSO of Oracle Corp.; Scott Charney, chief security strategist at Microsoft Corp.; Vint Cerf, vice president of technology strategy at MCI and co-designer of the TCP/IP protocol that underlies the Internet; and Whitfield Diffie, vice president and fellow at Sun Microsystems Inc. and the inventor of public-key encryption.

The new group will have a number of goals, but its primary purpose will be to serve as a forum for candid information exchange on security issues and to help define the role and duties of CSOs within large organizations. The council also intends to serve as a resource to government agencies and to take an active hand in helping to implement the National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace.

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