There’s A New Sheriff In Town
New SolarWinds CEO Sudhakar Ramakrishna (pictured) struck a different tone in his first public communication just seven days after starting as CEO of the embattled IT infrastructure management vendor. Unlike his predecessor Kevin Thompson, who is an accountant by training and led the firm from March 2010 to December 2020, Ramakrishna comes from a security background, having most recently led Pulse Secure.
During his five years as Pulse Secure’s CEO, Ramakrishna had to deal with hackers exploiting a widely known flaw in the company’s VPN appliance to carry out ransomware attacks many months after a patch had already been rolled out. Ramakrishna said Thursday the experience taught him to lead with humility, ownership, transparency, focused action, and bias toward customer safety and security.
“Although I accepted the position to become CEO before the Company [SolarWinds] was notified of the cyberattack, I feel an even greater commitment now to taking action, ensuring we learn from this experience, and continuing to deliver for our customers,” Ramakrishna wrote in a blog post published late Thursday.
From resetting privileged credentials and re-signing all digital certificates to manually checking source code and rolling out more threat hunting software, here are five critical changes Ramakrishna will make to put security front and center.
