Former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani leaves Trump Tower in November. (Image: CBSNews.com)
Rudy Giuliani has been tapped to “lend expertise” and to advise the Trump administration on cybersecurity.
The former New York mayor “will be sharing his expertise and insight as a trusted friend concerning private sector cybersecurity problems and emerging solutions developing in the private sector,” said a brief statement from the incoming Trump administration.
But details about Giuliani’s role were not immediately available.
Trump’s pick of Giuliani for this position isn’t all too surprising to security circles. It’s widely known that he is the chief executive of his own private-sector cybersecurity venture, Giuliani Partners.
But what isn’t known is what the company actually does.
Giuliani spent much of his time consulting after leaving office as mayor of New York at the end of 2001. His venture claims to offer “a comprehensive range of security and crisis management services.” His consulting firm has hired controversial staffers, and has worked for questionable clientele, reports have said.
Yet, even his cybersecurity venture’s website, filled with clunky Flash components and “cyber” stock imagery throughout, doesn’t advertise what it does.
For the past few months while Giuliani’s name was floated for positions for the Republican’s presidential campaign, we’ve tried to find out exactly what his company does, or can do better than any other security firm — to no avail. (If you have information relating to Giuliani’s company, there are a number of ways to contact me securely. We want to know, and we think others do as well.)
Yet, the company has made millions of dollars in contracts with various organizations, including the 2016 Olympic Committee.
Giuliani was most recently a guest speaker at the BlackBerry Security Summit earlier this year — the day after his bizarre appearance at the Republican National Committee — to give an equally unhinged speech comparing cybercrime to cancer and hackers to the “Mafia.”
The former phone maker BlackBerry just last week announced that Giuliani’s company would “assess infrastructures, identify potential cyber security vulnerabilities, address gaps and secure endpoints with the goal of offering another channel to bring customers to a new standard of security.”
So clearly the company is doing something right. Right?
It’s not known what Giuliani can or will bring to the table. We’ve reached out to the presidential transition team for more and will update if we hear back.
But right now there are more questions than answers over Giuliani’s involvement, given the lack of a clear and transparent directive on what his company does or how it (if at all) will benefit the transition team and the country.
