Tag Archive for: ops

Goldman Sachs acquires cybersecurity firm White Ops

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Cybersecurity firm White Ops has been acquired by multinational investment bank Goldman Sachs, in partnership with cyber solutions provider ClearSky Security and venture capital firm NightDragon.

The trio, led by Goldman Sachs’ Merchant Banking Division, have picked up White Ops from Paladin Capital Group, Grotech Ventures, and other shareholders. The terms of the transaction have not been disclosed.

White Ops hopes its new owners will support its next phase of growth and further accelerate its expansion into new markets.

“Goldman Sachs, ClearSky, and NightDragon are ideal partners to support the next phase of the Company’s evolution and growth across multiple markets, use cases and geographies,” said Tamer Hassan, CEO and Co-founder of White Ops. “Their continued support of our mission to disrupt the economics of cybercrime, global network of relationships, and market expertise provides a very strong foundation to execute on our vision to enable collective protection for the internet.”

In addition to Goldman Sachs representatives, Jay Leek of ClearSky and Dave DeWalt of NightDragon will join the White Ops Board of Directors.

The acquisition follows an initial investment in the company from Goldman Sachs and ClearSky earlier this year.

“We have been very pleased with the Company’s performance since our initial investment and we’re delighted to build on our current partnership, especially as White Ops continues to benefit from consumers’ shift to digital and clients increasingly require protection,” said Anthony Arnold, Managing Director at Goldman Sachs. “We look forward to supporting management in their next phase of growth.”

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US establishes Cyber Unified Coordination Group to respond to SolarWinds compromise. Report on Chinese influence ops delayed.

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The US Government and a large number of private organizations continue to assess the extent of the SolarWinds incident. The scope and extent of the damage are known to be large, but just how large, and who specifically was affected, remains under investigation. An op-ed by former US Homeland Security Advisor Bossert probably has it right in saying that the breach is “hard to overestimate.”

A joint statement yesterday from the US FBI, CISA, and ODNI says that the Government has invoked Presidential Policy Directive (PPD) 41 to establish a Cyber Unified Coordination Group to coordinate a whole-of-Government response to the Russian cyber operation that exploited SolarWinds’ Orion platform.

According to KrebsOnSecurity, FireEye, Microsoft, and GoDaddy cooperated on a response to the SolarWinds compromise by establishing a killswitch to disable Sunburst backdoor instances still beaconing to their original domain. As FireEye said in widely quoted statement, “this actor moved quickly to establish additional persistent mechanisms to access to [sic] victim networks beyond the SUNBURST backdoor,” so the killswitch is far from representing a thorough remediation. BleepingComputer has a summary of what’s publicly available so far.

Bloomberg reports that the US Director of National Intelligence said yesterday that the Intelligence Community will not meet tomorrow’s deadline to report to Congress about Chinese influence operations in the 2020 election season. That there were attempts seems clear enough, but how extensive they were, and how much prominence they should be given, remains a matter of disagreement among the agencies in the Intelligence Community.

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Move to emergency ops center beefs up security for NC elections officials :: WRAL.com

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By Joe Fisher, WRAL multimedia journalist

Raleigh, N.C. — State officials say securing the vote in this year’s elections means moving to a more secure building on election night.

An Elon University Poll released Thursday shows that only two-thirds of North Carolina voters are ready to accept the outcome of the presidential election and that about three-fourths are concerned about violence breaking out after the election.

President Donald Trump has only added to doubts over the election by repeatedly suggesting without any evidence that it would be rife with fraud and that he might not accept the results if he loses to Democrat Joe Biden.

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Wake County poll worker Alphonza Shire said he worries about election interference from foreign governments and others.

“They did it with the last presidential run,” Shire said.

To boost confidence in North Carolina’s results, the State Board of Elections will move Tuesday from its downtown Raleigh offices to the state’s Emergency Operations Center. The move not only provides more space for social distancing of the large number of people working on election night, it also provides more security against a potential cyberattack or other threat to the vote count.

The plan to activate the EOC has been in the works for months, officials said, and they had a test run in June during a primary for a congressional race in western North Carolina.

“This is one of the many steps we have taken in recent years to ensure the integrity of the election and to make sure that election and emergency officials are prepared to respond to any problems that arise, such as voting issues, polling place disruptions or cybersecurity threats,” elections board spokesman Patrick Gannon said in a statement.

On Election Day, federal and state partners will work under one roof, including the North Carolina National Guard’s cybersecurity team. The team has been visiting county election boards in recent months, scanning systems for potential weaknesses.

“We’ll dig into their network configurations, their server configurations, their computer configurations,” Lt. Col. Seth Barun said. “We say, ‘This is…

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