Saturday, October 24, 2020

Well, this is embarrassing…


If you're looking for my pandemic posts, go here.

This recent article in the Daily Beast, subtitled “Ich bin ein Red Flag”, describes how a German cybersecurity expert, known for his contacts with government officials throughout Europe and the US, was outed by the German government early in 2019 for being part of a Russian government influence operation. However, somehow six months later he was meeting in Washington with DHS cybersecurity officials, as well as Microsoft and Amazon executives. All of this at a time when a simple Google search would have discovered the true story about him.

But there’s more to the story. Not only did he meet with the above parties, he met in Washington with executives of a little-known power industry organization: the North American Electric Reliability Corporation. And he met with the California Public Utilities Commission. Have any of you heard of these two organizations?

To be fair, he had been traveling to the US for a number of years before he was outed, and the article doesn’t specifically say that he met with NERC and the CPUC after the outing. But this does go to show that you need to be careful about the people you meet with, not just the ones you hire.

 

 

Any opinions expressed in this blog post are strictly mine and are not necessarily shared by any of the clients of Tom Alrich LLC. If you would like to comment on what you have read here, I would love to hear from you. Please email me at tom@tomalrich.com.

 

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