The person in charge of cybersecurity at the White House is not happy at the administration’s lax attitude to protecting their IT infrastructure. In fact, Dimitrios Vistakis is so unhappy with the administration that he has quit and written a fiery memo condemning the cybersecurity policies of Trump’s White House.
The White House has suffered security breaches in the past, with hackers managing to access the system back in 2014. However, since former president Barack Obama brought on a cybersecurity team led by Vistakis, there has been no further breach to the IT systems at the White House.
Unfortunately, Trump doesn’t seem to be a fan of Obama-era employees, nor cybersecurity, with Vistakis seething that the administration has been purging cybersecurity staff that were brought on to protect the White House.
“They say that history repeats itself. Unfortunately given all of the changes I’ve seen in the past three months, I foresee the White House is posturing itself to be electronically compromised once again. Allowing for a large portion of institutional knowledge to concurrently walk right out the front door seems contrary to the best of interests of the mission and organisation as a whole,” noted Vistakis in the memo leaked to Axios.
The White House isn’t just firing employees in the Office of the Chief Information Security Officer (OCISO) but has been accused of being deliberately hostile towards the team. This includes withholding bonuses and pressuring employees to quit by limiting their job functions.
It seems that the White House has achieved what it set out to do, with the resignation of Vistakis a major blow to OCISO. It doesn’t seem like the Trump administration cares all that much about cybersecurity anyway, as Vistakis noted, “Measuring the success of your security staff by the frequency major compromises are identified versus the duration of time since the last compromise is absurd.”
