Tag Archive for: ceo

Parler CEO goes into hiding blaming Amazon flak, death threats

/in


By Joel Rosenblatt | Bloomberg

The chief executive officer of Parler says he’s gone into hiding after receiving death threats.

John Matze Jr.’s social media platform was briefly the new home to conservative supporters of Donald Trump who flocked to it after Twitter banned the president. But Parler went dark Sunday after Apple Inc. and Google removed it from their app stores and Amazon.com pulled the plug on its web-hosting service, citing violent content that the e-commerce giant says played into the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.

“Many Parler employees are suffering harassment and hostility, fear for their safety and that of their families, and in some cases have fled their home state to escape persecution,” Matze’s lawyer said in Parler’s lawsuit aimed at forcing Amazon Web Services to put the platform back online. Matze had to “go into hiding with his family after receiving death threats and invasive personal security breaches.”

The CEO didn’t specify the source of the threats, but his lawyer said in a filing that Matze’s covert action was required because he’s been spotlighted “as the CEO of the company AWS continues to vilify.”

Source…

SolarWinds’ new CEO will make these 5 changes post-hack – Security

/in


New SolarWinds CEO Sudhakar Ramakrishna struck a different tone in his first public communication just seven days after starting as CEO of the embattled IT infrastructure management vendor. Unlike his predecessor Kevin Thompson, who is an accountant by training and led the firm from March 2010 to December 2020, Ramakrishna comes from a security background, having most recently led Pulse Secure.

During his five years as Pulse Secure’s CEO, Ramakrishna had to deal with hackers exploiting a widely known flaw in the company’s VPN appliance to carry out ransomware attacks many months after a patch had already been rolled out. Ramakrishna said Thursday the experience taught him to lead with humility, ownership, transparency, focused action, and bias toward customer safety and security.

“Although I accepted the position to become CEO before the Company [SolarWinds] was notified of the cyberattack, I feel an even greater commitment now to taking action, ensuring we learn from this experience, and continuing to deliver for our customers,” Ramakrishna wrote in a blog post published late Thursday.

From resetting privileged credentials and re-signing all digital certificates to manually checking source code and rolling out more threat hunting software, here are five critical changes Ramakrishna will make to put security front and center.

5. Leverage third-party tools, ethical hackers for insight

Ramakrishna said SolarWinds will leverage third-party tools to expand the security analysis of the source code for Orion software as well as related products. The company also pledges to engage with and fund ethical hacking from white hat communities to quickly identify, report and remediate security issues across the entire SolarWinds portfolio, according to Ramakrishna.

Vulnerability disclosure programs are nearly as old as the internet itself but didn’t gain traction until the early 2010s when companies like Microsoft, Google, Facebook and Mozilla rolled out programs of their own. Companies without a formal vulnerability disclosure policy often remain in the dark about known flaws in their architecture, with hackers not reporting flaws they’ve found due to fear…

Source…

Meet The Super Rich Czech Tech Company — And Its Russian CEO —Denying Links To The Huge SolarWinds Hack

/in


Maxim Shafirov is looking grizzled, grumbling through a stubbled muzzle about having just two hours sleep, hunched over his computer as the snow falls behind him in a window that looks out to a wintry St. Petersburg. The Russian native’s grouchiness is understandable.

Shafirov is the CEO of Czech company JetBrains, which was likely one of the biggest tech companies you’d never heard of, until Wednesday when reports cited government sources saying it was being investigated for links to huge cyberattacks on U.S. government agencies and tech giants, via the hack of another low-profile IT provider, SolarWinds, and scores of its clients, including federal agencies. For millions of coders, the Prague-based business’ tools are invaluable, providing all manner of software to make their app building that much easier. Founded in 2000, it claims over 8 million paying users in over 213 countries. Company revenue for 2019, according to the most recently-available results for the privately-held business, stood at $270 million, with year-on-year growth of 33%. Shafirov, in an upbeat moment in an interview with Forbes, says that despite the Covid-19 pandemic, its revenue growth this last year was 10%, indicating near $300 million for 2020. The business was a so-called “unicorn” worth more than $1 billion, according to a JetBrains spokesperson.

Few outside the tech world would’ve paid the company much attention until reports in the New York Times, Reuters and the Wall Street Journal indicated those investigating what’s become one of the most severe acts of cyber espionage in recent memory were looking at the possibility JetBrains was involved. The reports hint JetBrains, or one of its apps, TeamCity, was hacked, leading to an infiltration at SolarWinds, which, in turn, had one of its own tools compromised and used to hijack customer networks. Amongst the victims are the Department of Justice, which yesterday revealed 3% of its Office 365 emails had been compromised. It joined the Department of Energy, the Treasury, Microsoft,…

Source…

Loptr CEO Discusses Solarwinds Breach and How to Stay Safe

/in


A recent cyberattack on Solarwinds compromised information from thousands of companies, prompting concerns across the country.

From March through December, hackers broke into the Solarwinds system and placed malware on the programs of 18,000 companies.

So how do you stay safe online and protect yourself from security breaches? Spectrum News spoke to the CEO of a computer security service to find out.

Loptr Founder and CEO Dave Newell said companies should monitor their networks and see who is connected to their servers. As for the average citizen, watch your own computer networks, beware of phony ads and stay away from skeptical websites that you may even come across on social media.

“There’s this huge fraudulent activity going on with ads that are being sent to us via Facebook and via the web for products that really don’t exist from companies that are fake or are designed to send the wrong thing to you,” he said.

When you are shopping online you should go to well-known sites, call the company you wish to buy from and read reviews of websites and online stores before making any purchases.

Source…