
Cybersecurity under fire: CISA’s former deputy director decries post-election…
Matt Travis talks about CISA’s role in the recent US elections and how President Trump and his surrogates have politicized the security function.
Matt Travis, the former deputy director of the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), kicked off this year’s Aspen Cyber Summit yesterday with a keynote interview by journalist Kara Swisher. Travis provided an insider’s view of the events leading up to the firing of CISA director Christopher Krebs and discussed the fallout from President Donald Trump’s attempts to undermine the agency.
The just-concluded president election represented “the most secure election in American history,” according to Krebs. Despite this achievement, or perhaps because of it, Krebs was summarily fired by Donald Trump via a tweet on November 17. Before Krebs was dismissed, the White House asked for the resignation of Brian Ware, the highly regarded assistant director for cybersecurity for CISA. After Krebs’ forced departure, Matt Travis, CISA deputy director and Krebs’ right-hand man at CISA, resigned from the agency.
On Sunday, Krebs, a lifelong Republican, told 60 Minutes’ Scott Pelley that he has complete confidence in the election outcome. He dismissed as conspiracy theories some of Trump’s increasingly convoluted stories of how President-Elect Joe Biden “stole” the election. Krebs said that Trump’s attorney Rudy Giuliani’s promotion of unproven election fraud was an “attempt to undermine confidence in the election, to confuse people, to scare people.”
Following the 60 Minutes interview, another Trump attorney, Joseph DiGenova, said that Krebs should be “taken out and shot” for contradicting Trump’s unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud. Yesterday, Krebs told CBS’s Savannah Guthrie that he is looking into potential legal action following DiGenova’s bald threat. Alex Stamos, former Facebook CISO and founder of the Stanford Internet Observatory, filed a complaint against DiGenova with the DC Bar’s Office of Disciplinary Counsel and encouraged his fellow infosec peers to do the same.
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