Two people who left their last jobs in the midst of scandals they have come together to rehabilitate the image of a company that is surely going through its worst days.
The former director of the Cyber Security and Infrastructure Agency, Chris Krebs, fired unceremoniously by President Trump after the November election, he founded a new company with Alex Stamos, the former head of Facebook’s security operations, who left the company amid revelations about his involvement in the Cambridge-Analytica scandal. Just called the Krebs Stamos group, the startup already has its first customer: a small company called SolarWinds.
That’s okay. The software company in the middle of the greatest pirate in American history has hired Krebs and Stamos as consultants to help rebuild trust in their brand. Now ubiquitously known as the “SolarWinds hack”, the apparently of Russian origin the cyber intrusion scandal has sunk both the public and private sectors, and it only continues to grow. There are about 18,000 entities it is believed to have been affected, and it is still unclear to what extent state-backed likely hackers were able to gather information through their operations.
“Armed with what we have learned from this attack, we are also reflecting on our own security practices and looking for opportunities to improve our stance and policies.” a spokesman for SolarWinds he told Bloomberg News. “We have brought the experience of Chris Krebs and Alex Stamos to assist us in this review and provide the best guidance from our class on our path to evolving into a leading company in secure software development in the industry.”
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Hiring Krebs and Stamos is an interesting move, as, like SolarWinds, they have a significant professional reputation that, however, has been forced to endure several major computer scandals.
Previously, Krebs was the director of CISA, one of the most prominent cyber positions of the federal government. Trump fired Krebs after refusing to back up president is fake claims about a “rigged election” and electoral fraud. While Krebs is said to have helped with presiding over the “safest elections” in history, also served CISA as SolarWinds hackers apparently went into every conceivable federal agency, not a spectacular thing to have on your resume.
Meanwhile, Stamos previously worked as a security executive at Yahoo at the same time when Russian hackers compromised approximately 500 million Yahoo user accounts. He joined Facebook in 2015 as acraised ssecuritymore effective but very publicly he left the company three years later when he was embroiled in the Cambridge-Analytica scandal. Stamos had advocated “more outreach around Russian platform interference and some restructuring to better address the issues,” but the company’s leadership received resistance. the New York Times reported at that time.
Krebs announced Friday morning the news of the new Stamos and Stamos concert via Twitter.
Although it is not clear yet what kind of services the Krebs Stamos group will offer (or who, if any, its other customers), there is currently talk of the duo’s website providing its customers with an understanding of “the threats they face“And“ weaknesses in their stance, ”while providing them with“ clear, sincere, experienced advice on critical and enduring decisions in times of extreme crisis. ”Certainly, Stamos and Krebs have experience with this.