- The Washington Times - Friday, January 8, 2021

Christopher C. Krebs announced his next career move Friday after having been fired by President Trump from his role as director of the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA.

Mr. Krebs said he started a consultancy firm with Alex Stamos, a former chief security officer for Yahoo! and Facebook, who confirmed they have been hired to help recently hacked IT company SolarWinds.

“Our concept is simple: help businesses manage cybersecurity risk as business risk, making the Internet a safer place in the meantime,” Mr. Krebs said on Twitter about the new consultancy firm.

Called the Krebs Stamos Group, the new firm will be “focused on helping companies live up to their responsibilities in an extremely challenging world,” Mr. Stamos said in a separate Twitter post.

News of the group and its hiring by SolarWinds, the proverbial launching pad for a recently discovered suspected cyberespionage campaign, was first reported by the British publication Financial Times.

Mr. Stamos, who is currently an adjunct professor at Stanford University, shared a subsequent Reuters article about his firm being hired by SolarWinds and said its work with them was already underway.

“We have already engaged in helping understand and recover from what looks to be one of the most serious foreign intrusion campaigns in history, and we will be helping others learn from this attack,” said Mr. Stamos.

Mr. Krebs, 43, worked as Microsoft’s director for cybersecurity policy before joining CISA, a part of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, as the agency’s first director beginning in late 2018.

CISA was the lead agency in charge of securing the nation’s election infrastructure when millions of Americans voted in the recent White House race decisively won by President-elect Joseph R. Biden.

Mr. Trump told numerous falsehoods about the election once his loss was apparent, prompting Mr. Krebs to push back and insist CISA succeeded. The president then fired him over Twitter on Nov. 17, 2020.

SolarWinds provides software to customers including multiple U.S. agencies and major corporations. It emerged last month that the company had been hacked and then used to infiltrate its clients.

The attack was “likely Russian in origin” and “an intelligence gathering effort,” the FBI, CISA, the National Security Agency and the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence said Tuesday.

“We have brought in the expertise of Chris Krebs and Alex Stamos to assist in this review and provide best-in-class guidance on our journey to evolve into an industry leading secure software development company,” said a SolarWinds spokesman, Reuters reported.

• Andrew Blake can be reached at ablake@washingtontimes.com.

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