When it comes to cyber security you don’t have to look far to see why things are currently in such bad shape, as we have often found that even security companies themselves are not doing the basic security step of keeping the software on their own website up to date. So looking to the private sector to improve the situation is a questionable call.
Incoming US President Donald Trump is going to be advised on the issue by former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who has a company that provides cyber security consulting of an unclear nature. ZDNet’s Zero Day blog reports they have been unable to find what the company actually 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.
So is the website of Rudy Giuliani’s security company at least in better shape than other cyber security companies? No:
The next release of Joomla, 3.1.4, (3.1.2 and 3.1.3 were not officially released) was released in July of 2013. The next version after that, which was released in August of that year, included a security fix. There have been numerous updates since then, including many that included security fixes.
The copyright date on the website is 2014, so even it hasn’t been actively managed since then, their keeping the software up to date stopped before that happened.
Other evidence out there doesn’t exactly point to Rudy Giuliani really having a great grasp of technology matters. For example, back in September he claimed the software used to wipe Hillary’s Clinton’s emails was “expensive” and “very expensive”:
The servers containing the emails was not only erased by merely deleting the email, but expensive BleachBit software was used to do it. This software is very expensive and is used by criminals seeking to hide evidence from law enforcement.
That is despite the fact that the software is free, something you can easily find out if you do search and pull up the software’s home page or the Wikipedia page about it.