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Salesforce Fires Red Team Staffers Who Gave Defcon Talk (zdnet.com)

Posted by msmash on from the you-gotta-go dept.

Josh Schwartz, Salesforce's director of offensive security, and John Cramb, a senior offensive security engineer, have been fired by the company after they gave talk at the Defcon security conference talk in Las Vegas last month, reports ZDNet. Schwartz and Cramb were presenting the details of their tool, called Meatpistol, a "modular malware implant framework (PDF)" similar in intent to the Metasploit toolkit used by many penetration testers. The tool, "pitched as taking 'the boring work' out of pen-testing to make red teams, including at Salesforce, more efficient and effective", was anticipated to be released as open source at the time of the presentation, but Salesforce has held back the code. From the report: [...] The two were fired "as soon as they got off stage" by a senior Salesforce executive, according to one of several people who witnessed the firing and offered their accounts. The unnamed Salesforce executive is said to have sent a text message to the duo half an hour before they were expected on stage to not to give the talk, but the message wasn't seen until after the talk had ended. The talk had been months in the making. Salesforce executives were first made aware of the project in a February meeting, and they had signed off on the project, according to one person with knowledge of the meeting. The tool was expected to be released later as an open-source project, allowing other red teams to use the project in their own companies. But in another text message seen by Schwartz and Cramb an hour before their talk, the same Salesforce executive told the speakers that they should not announce the public release of the code, despite a publicized and widely anticipated release. Later, on stage, Schwartz told attendees that he would fight to get the tool published.

5 of 154 comments (clear)

  1. I can only guess who'll get fired next... by Mysticalfruit · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I hope this story is true, but my bullshit alarm is going off slightly. So when you didn't get a response to your text... you simply did nothing and waited to fire two of the best pen testers in the world? Sorry sounds fishing, but moving on...

    If it did go down this way something tells me when the upper-upper management gets wind of how poorly this piece of asshattery was executed, this executive will be told politely to GTFO. The bad press alone will likely be this clowns undoing. The angry masses will demand a sacrifice and one they shall have.

    --
    Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
    1. Re:I can only guess who'll get fired next... by meerling · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Actually that sounds pretty standard for a lot of execs out there.

      You have no idea how many support calls I took from crying secretaries because their boss told them to have it fixed today or they were fired. That's pretty rough, but it gets worse. The executive douche has the box locked, hasn't told the secretary what the password is, and can't be reached or won't answer the phone.

      I'd get about 2 or 3 of those calls a month on the corporate support lines. I could do some pretty fantastic things over the phone with people that are marginally competent, but if they can't access the machine due to locks or passwords, there's nothing I can (legally) do about it. (When on a support call, even if you know a grey area way around the access issue, you don't even mention it. If they think of it on their own and do it, that's not your problem. Specifically where one company had to break down the door to the server room to get in and fix the server because the boss was out of the state on a 2 week vacation and took the only key with him.)

  2. Re:Unrealistic expectations by avandesande · · Score: 1, Interesting

    You are just speculating. They might have admitted to having read the message and decided to go along with the talk anyway.

    --
    love is just extroverted narcissism
  3. Re:Better headline by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I just noticed Meatpistol is an anagram of Metasploit

  4. Expected Outcome by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    The Executive VP / CISO (Jim Alkove) fired the employees shortly after they walked off stage, and several of us heard bits of that conversation.

    After removing every senior leader from the previous organization, he brought dozens of Microsoft VPs and managers to Salesforce. From what I understand, the company used to have one of the top security teams in the industry, but 80% of their security leaders and top talent left in the last 6 months. If their CEO doesn't get involved, the despotic culture will prevail and sadly whatever talent is left will flock to other companies.

    This is how he works. This is the reason he was invited to leave Nest.