Rudy Giuliani to coordinate regular cybersecurity meetings between Trump, tech leaders

‘That’s where we have the great creativity.’

Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani says Donald Trump has tapped him to gather top cybersecurity leaders to meet with the administration regularly to share “all the information available in the private sector” with the goal of improving national cyber defenses “because we’re so far behind.”

“The president elect-decided he wanted to bring in on a regular basis the people in the private sector, the corporate leaders in particular and thought leaders in the private sector who are working on security for cyber because we’re so far behind,” Giuliani said on Fox and Friends.

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He says Trump thinks bringing this group together would encourage them to share information they might not otherwise in order to come up with cybersecurity answers they haven’t come up with already.

“It’s like cancer,” he says. “You know, there’s cancer research going on all over the place, you’d almost wish they’d all get together in one room and maybe we’d find a cure.”

President Barack Obama held a cybersecurity summit last February with similar goals, at which he urged more sharing of threat information.

Giuliani, who announced his own appointment as Trump’s cyber adviser, did not say who would be invited to the meetings or when the first would be held. “The idea here is to bring together corporate leaders and their technological people,” he says.

His job will be to set and facilitate the meetings for Trump and other members of the administration. “I’ll get the people in, make sure the meeting takes place, make sure they get the information from the private sector,” he says.

The meetings have two purposes. “First of all it’ll give the government all the information available in the private sector. Number two, it’ll form a little more connection between these people who are doing cybersecurity so they can work with each other,” Giuliani says.

“And my belief is, as always, that the answer to cybersecurity is going to be found in the private sector. That’s where we have the great creativity, that’s where we have the huge amount of money and that’s where we have these great companies - the greatest in the world.”

Guiliani is chairman and CEO of Guiliani partners, a management consulting firm. He is also chairman of the cybersecurity, privacy and crisis-management practice for the law firm Greenberg Traurig.

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