Trump's Cybersecurity Pick Already Hacked?
Photo by Gage Skidmore / CC BY-SA 2.0 / Cropped from original
There are only two days left until the inauguration of Donald Trump as President of the United States. If you read this blog regularly, you’ll know we’ve been following the news of Trump’s plans for cybersecurity and Internet privacy—and what those plans mean for you—pretty closely. Unfortunately, until last week, we didn’t have much to go on as far as what Trump plans to do to ensure US cybersecurity; we were only able to see what he planned not to do, at least when it came to following recommendations put forward by the outgoing Obama administration.
Last week, however, Donald Trump named Rudy Giuliani, former mayor of New York City and CEO of security consulting firm Giuliani Partners, to head up his cybersecurity team. Giuliani formed the company in 2005 in response to reports showing that cybersecurity threats would only increase, and since then has been offering services such as penetration testing to corporate clients.
At first glance, it seems like good news that Trump has appointed someone with over 10 years of experience in the field to head up his cybersecurity expert team. Unfortunately, it’s not clear that Giuliani’s experience in corporate cybersecurity will translate to keep the government—and the country—safe from cyber threats.
In fact, many industry experts in cybersecurity haven’t even heard of Giuliani Partners (or Giuliani Security and Safety, its subsidiary) and have expressed scepticism that the former NYC mayor has the skills to deal with the sort of cyber threats the US is likely to encounter. In the wake of the announcement, some security researchers decided to visit Giuliani Partners’ websites—and found a number of vulnerabilities, which they published on Twitter late last week.
This week, if you try to visit giulianipartners.com or giulianisecurity.com, you won’t find those vulnerabilities. You won’t find much of anything: both websites are currently offline, although the Wayback Machine offers an older cached version of the giulianisecurity.com site. It’s possible that after the sites’ vulnerabilities were publicized the companies chose to pull them in order to shore up their security, although some are speculating that the nation’s newest cybersecurity leader has already been the victim of a hack.
Of course, Giuliani wouldn’t be personally working as a White Hat hacker for the US government in his new role, but it is concerning that someone taking over as head of the country’s cybersecurity team doesn’t have stronger ties or a better (or any) reputation among top security experts.
Trump’s Cybersecurity Pick Already Hacked? was originally published on Liquidum Blog
Cybersecurity experts on Giuliani:











