About Rudy

Giuliani does head a consulting firm in New York called Giuliani Partners that supposedly focuses on cybersecurity, but Vice’s Motherboard reported yesterday, it’s tough to tell what they actually do, and it’s even tougher to tell what Giuliani does for them, besides being the face of the operation while saying outrageous things on television.

As Motherboard’s Jason Koebler and Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai wrote, “Unlike many other cybersecurity firms, Giuliani Partners does not publish white papers about malware and large-scale hacks, or push for increased adoption of encryption, which would enhance cybersecurity across the board. In fact, it doesn’t talk much about cybersecurity at all, instead choosing to focus on its more traditional anti-crime consulting work.”

  Guardian

This made me wonder if Giuliani Partners is like Dubya's Crawford Ranch: created in preparation for a presidential administration. So, I thought I'd have a look at its website:



OK. Not encouraging. But maybe the website is having issues since Rudi was named as chief of cybersecurity for the Trump administration. Or maybe this is the problem:

Just after the Trump team’s announcement, security experts took a look at Giuliani Partner’s website and started mercilessly mocking it on Twitter for glaring vulnerabilities and its own lax cybersecurity practices that makes it looks more like a website built in the mid 1990s than a supposedly respected cybersecurity firm would present the public today.

Here's Wikipedia's summary:

And yet, that doesn't tell me anything about its cybersecurity services.

BlackBerry has been selected by Giuliani Partners to support cyber security consulting services to the government and to private firms. The recently released BlackBerry Secure platform will provide the underlying software for the firm’s cyber security consulting product.

The partnership was announced at the CES 2017 conference in Las Vegas.

  

I see. Crawford Ranch.

Rudy Giuliani, chairman and CEO of Giuliani Partners, believes that the partnership between his consulting firm and BlackBerry will ‘enable corporations to set a new standard for being cyber secure.’

[...]

Giuliani Partners will use BlackBerry Secure software to analyze existing infrastructure, identify vulnerabilities, and devise solutions to make cyber systems more secure. For its part, BlackBerry will achieve another step in the effort to reinvent itself as a provider of cyber security solutions, after last year’s announcement that the company would begin outsourcing production of its signature mobile phones.

BlackBerry’s foray into the cyber security arena is bolstered by last year’s acquisition of UK security firm Encription, which helped the company to change focus from a phone-based past to a more services-oriented future.

[...]

Giuliani was the keynote speaker at last July’s BlackBerry Security Summit. At the time, he said his interest in cyber security stemmed from his strong feelings about fighting crime and identity theft.

“Blackberry is on the cutting edge of thwarting crime,” he said. “I’m very proud to be working with them.”

And now I can get that appointment.

It does seem as though his company had some cybersecurity dealings in the early 2000s.

Marketwatch interview does little to show off Giuliani’s understanding of cybersecurity issues, and more to make him seems like a greedy bastard looking to line his own pockets.

MW: So Giuliani Partners began penetration-testing companies — attacking from the outside to find vulnerabilities hackers may exploit — back in 2003?

RG: 2004, 2005 by the time we got started.

MW: How many clients did you have back then?

RG: Maybe 30.

MW: Did you find that anyone cared about cybersecurity back then?

RG: These were all friends of mine, friends of his. They’d give me a nice meeting and they’d look at me, and they’d look at the bill. And the bill was high, but it wasn’t high for them — $10 million, $20 million, something like that. It wasn’t like the kind of money they’re spending now. (laughs)

So, because Giuliani made a bunch of money selling expensive cybersecurity services to his friends in the early 2000s—when the state of cybersecurity was completely different as it is today— he thinks he would be well equipped to tackle the multiple facets of America’s cybersecurity issue.

  Gizmodo

[H]iring people with little or no bona fide security experience to head up cybersecurity practices in government is sadly a tried and true pastime in Washington.

  Guardian

Isn't that the truth.

[I]t was only after the DNC’s leaked emails started being published in the summer that the committee announced it would create a Cybersecurity Advisory Board to “ensure that the DNC’s cybersecurity capabilities are best-in-class”.

As technologist Chris Soghoian asked at the time, “Will the DNC cyber board have experienced cybersecurity pros or just ex senior intelligence officials & politicians?” Sure enough, a day later when the lineup was announced, every person on it was either a lawyer or ex-government official – not an engineer or computer scientist among them.

Congress itself suffers from the same problem. While there are four members of the House with a computer science degree, none of them have been assigned to the cybersecurity subcommittee by their parties’ leadership.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.