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The Trump administration has gutted the Department of Homeland Security’s advisors, removing key individuals who helped the Department investigate cyber threats.
“In alignment with the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) commitment to eliminating the misuse of resources and ensuring that DHS activities prioritize our national security, I am directing the termination of all current memberships on advisory committees within DHS, effective immediately,” said a letter signed by acting director Benjamine C. Huffman.
“Future committee activities will be focused solely on advancing our critical mission to protect the homeland and support DHS’s strategic priorities. To outgoing advisory board members, you are welcome to reapply, thank you for your service.”
The removals included people on the DHS’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) Cyber Safety Review Board (CSRB). The CSRB joined DHS officials and private individuals with deep knowledge of cybersecurity and set them to the task of investigating online threats.
The board had gained notoriety after investigating major hacking incidents including the Log4Shell vulnerability, the hacking group Lapsus$, and the compromises of Microsoft Exchange inboxes in 2023. The board was investigating the CCP-backed Salt Typhoon, a hacking group that compromised major telecom companies in the past few years.
One of the terminated board members is Chris Krebs, the Chief Intelligence Officer of SentinelOne. Krebs had previously served as the head of CISA but was fired by Trump after pushing back on the President’s claims of election interference in 2020. “He should be drawn and quartered. Taken out at dawn and shot,” one of Trump’s lawyers said of Krebs at the time.
The letter was signed by acting DHS director Benjamine C. Huffman but is in line with the position of possible incoming chief Kristi Noem and several other Republicans. During her confirmation hearing last week, Noem said that CISA had “gotten far off mission.”
Noem’s specific complaint is that CISA was doing too much work fighting misinformation and disinformation online. “CISA needs to be much more effective, smaller, more nimble, to really fulfill their mission,” she said. “The mission of it is to hunt and harden. It’s to find those bad actors and help work with local and state critical infrastructure entities so that they can help them be prepared for such cyberattacks.”
This is exactly what it had been doing when the Trump administration came into office. The blanket removal of the members of the CSRB and all other DHS advisory positions will only delay investigations into Salt Typhoon and other threats. If you’re a hacker with ill intent, now is a great time to slip under the radar.
