Two people who left their last job amid brewing scandals have worked together to restore the image of a company that is certainly going through its worst days ever.
Chris Krebs, former director of the cybersecurity and infrastructure security agency, fired unceremoniously by President Trump founded a new company after the November election with Alex Stamos, the former head of Facebook’s security operations, who left the company amid revelations about her involvement in the seedy Cambridge Analytica scandal. Just called the Krebs Stamos Groupthe startup already has its first customer: a small company called SolarWinds.
That’s right. The software company in the middle of the biggest hack in American history has hired Krebs and Stamos as consultants to rebuild trust in their brand. Now ubiquitously known as the “SolarWinds Hack”, the apparently Russian-of-origin cyber-burglary scandal has been overrun the public and private sector and only continues to grow. About 18,000 entities are thought to have been affected by it, and the extent to which the likely state-backed hackers could gather intelligence through their operations is still unclear.
“Armed with what we have learned from this attack, we are also thinking about our own security practices and looking for ways to improve our attitudes and policies,” a SolarWinds spokesperson Bloomberg told News. “We brought in the expertise of Chris Krebs and Alex Stamos to assist with this assessment and provide the best guidance on our journey to evolve into a leading secure software development company.”
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Hiring Krebs and Stamos is an interesting move as they, like SolarWinds, have a significant professional reputation that has nevertheless endured several major IT scandals.
Previously, Krebs was director of the CISA, one of the most prominent cyber positions within the federal government. Trump fired Krebs after he refused to back up the president is not true allegations of “falsified elections” and voter fraud. While Krebs is said to have assisted chairing the “safest election” ever, he also served at CISA while the SolarWinds hackers apparently made their way into every federal agency imaginable – nothing spectacular to have on your resume.
Stamos, meanwhile, previously worked as a security manager at Yahoo when Russian hackers compromised about 500 million Yahoo user accounts. He joined Facebook in 2015 as craised security nfficer but very publicly left the company three years later when it got involved in the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Stamos had argued for “more disclosure around Russian meddling of the platform and some restructuring to better address the issues,” but met with resistance from company leadership, the New York Times reported at that time.
Krebs announced the news of his and Stamos’ new performance Friday morning via Twitter.
While it is so far unclear exactly what kind of services the Krebs Stamos Group will be offering (or who, if any, their other customers are), the duo’s website is currently talking about provide their customers with insight into “the threats they faceAnd ‘the weaknesses in their attitudes’, while also giving them ‘clear, candid and experienced advice on critical, long-term decisions in times of extreme crisis’. Sure, Stamos and Krebs have experience with that.