Category: News

April 20th, 2025 — Baltimore, MD — Clear Ridge Defense, LLC (CRD), a leading provider of cyberspace operations, cybersecurity, and intelligence services to the U.S. government, proudly marks its 10-year anniversary this month. Since its founding in 2015, CRD has grown from a small team of cyber professionals to a trusted partner supporting missions across the Department of Defense, Intelligence Community, and Federal Civilian agencies.

“This milestone reflects a decade of hard work, innovation, and commitment to national security,” said Jeffrey Bullock, CEO of Clear Ridge Defense. “We’re incredibly proud of the team we’ve built, the partnerships we’ve developed, and the mission-critical work we support every day.”

CRD’s first decade has been defined by steady growth and strategic expansion. The company now employs nearly 100 professionals working on some of the most complex challenges in cyberspace. Over the past several years, CRD has secured two prime contract awards, demonstrating its ability to lead and deliver on large-scale, high-impact programs. In addition to its Baltimore, Maryland headquarters, CRD has expanded its presence to key national security hubs, including Fort Bragg, Tampa, Quantico, and Scott Air Force Base.

CRD’s core capabilities include cyberspace operations, threat analysis, secure systems engineering, and mission support—delivered to clients such as U.S. Cyber Command, the U.S. Marine Corps, the Intelligence Community, NASA, and NOAA. The company has built a reputation for technical excellence, operational agility, and a people-first culture that prioritizes employee growth and mission success.

“As we enter our second decade, we’re focused on scaling smartly, continuing to invest in our people, and staying aligned with our mission and culture,” said Chris Comstock, COO of Clear Ridge Defense. “It’s been an exciting journey—and we’re looking forward to what’s next.”

For more information about Clear Ridge Defense and its mission, visit www.clridge.com.

Baltimore, MD, Dec 23, 2022 – Clear Ridge Defense paired with the Soldiers’ Angels Adopt-A-Family holiday program to help veteran and deployed military families have a memorable Christmas season. Soldier’s Angels is a national non-profit organization that provides aid, comfort, and resources to veterans, military, and their families through a wide variety of support programs ranging from collecting food bank donations, organizing Wounded Warrior blessing boxes for their caregivers, forming crafting groups to knit/crochet baby blankets and hats for new mothers, and providing companionship at VA hospitals.  Through the Adopt-A-Family program, CRD selected a family of four children from Fulton, NY, and a family of four children from Gary, IN to lend Santa a hand and fulfill the children’s Christmas wish list. CRD employees sent a combined 51 gifts to the families totaling over $1,400.  Each family received a $100 grocery gift card to go towards the holiday meal and each child received a minimum of five gifts. Eligible military and veteran families face many challenges throughout the year;  the Adopt-A-Family program helps to ensure providing a memorable Christmas isn’t one of them.

Baltimore, MD, Dec 9, 2022 – For 75 years, the Marines have helped Santa collect over 600 million toys to be delivered to 300 million children.  Clear Ridge Defense answered the call to duty and collected 103 toys for the Baltimore area’s annual toy drive campaign.  Toys were collected at company social events throughout the Fall and concluded with a final toy drive push during the annual family Christmas party.  CRD joined local schools, businesses, organizations, and corporations to hand deliver the toys to the Marines as part of the 14^th Annual Toys for Tots Roll Call hosted by FOX 45 Morning News at the Harley Davidson of Baltimore. Santa’s Helpers were tasked with filling a 6-ton Marine truck with over 100,000 Toys for Tots that will be distributed to approximately 40,000 local children.

The past three weeks have been what some cyber professionals are considering the greatest stress test of systems security of the decade.  This crisis is in response to the log4j vulnerability, a vulnerability that has gained unprecedented coverage in mainstream media and in public discourse. This exploit will have implications reaching across every industry, and every machine using Java. However, log4j is only one of the many Remote Code Execution (RCE) vulnerabilities that plague Java.

David Johnson, one of Clear Ridge Defense’s talented Senior Cyber Tool Developers, gave his input into the patching and context of RCE vulnerabilities within Java.

“Many times, in Java, functionality is added with an opt-out requirement to remove or reduce functionality within libraries. This paradigm of Java development should shift from an opt-out to a community acceptance of opt-in functionality and configuration.”

In layman’s terms, vulnerable features are included within your boiler-plate Java suite and must be manually opted-out out of. David suggests that reducing the “bells and whistles” included in your suite and adding the ability to “opt-in” to features, would increase your ability to manage the security within Java.

We want to hear your input on RCE response and management! Please comment your thoughts below!

Concerned about potential vulnerabilities within your own company’s infrastructure? Contact us to see if your company qualifies for our free initial open-source assessment.

Interested in being part of the team working to resolve issues like this? Join the Clear Ridge Defense team. We hire elite talent from around the country to solve cutting edge problems for our clients.

 

Additional resources and readings:

Federal Trade Commission’s statement regarding the log4j vulnerability.

Security Magazine’s article on the way forward following log4j.

Presentation from 2016 Blackhat Conference showing JNDI attack vectors.

 

Baltimore, MD, May 19, 2020 –

Clear Ridge Defense provides cybersecurity solutions to companies that help combat the following example threats currently plaguing companies across the globe.  Our team members are highly-trained technical experts who are trusted to support both federal and commercial clients.  We can help assess any company’s security architecture and can provide training to help prevent the next attempted data breach from being successful.  “SEE IF YOUR COMPANY QUALIFIES FOR OUR FREE INITIAL OPEN SOURCE ASSESSMENT” 

According to IBM, the average cost of a data breach in 2019 was $3.92M; with the healthcare industry hit the hardest with an average cost of $6.45M.  The average attack lasted 279 days from detection to containment which is far too long for a company to withstand in today’s circumstances.  Contact us at https://clridge.com/request-info/ and start implementing a cybersecurity solution to protect your company.  

Consider: 

• The overall impacts to businesses from the 2019 novel coronavirus will be undoubtedly felt long after the crisis passes.  The virus has altered the way companies conduct their daily business.  Work that once had to be performed from an office environment is now completed at home.  Workers who were previously unfamiliar with video telecommunications applications used in the corporate scene are now familiar with names such as Zoom or Microsoft’s Teams and are using them on a daily basis.  While these apps are great for maintaining accountability and keeping communications open, their sudden spike in usage creates unique problems that threaten the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of corporate data.    

• According to the Brookings Institution approximately half of the American workforce is currently working from home, as opposed to a reported 12% from 2017-2018 data.  This incredible spike occurred in a relatively short time span as COVID-19 spread across the country and workers were encouraged to stay at home.  Many companies and IT departments are understandably unprepared for such a dramatic shift and workers have begun to access and work on company data from personally owned devices.  All of the additional devices, locations, and users now accessing that data provide malicious cyber actors with an increased surface area to target, which they have been using.    

• The Federal Bureau of Investigation reports that cybercrime has increased somewhere between three- and four-fold since the crisis began.  Attackers are taking advantage of users who are uneducated on basic cybersecurity practices and are compromising user devices in order to steal personal information or implant software for continuous data extraction.  These attacks are taking advantage of the general public’s need for information related to COVID-19 such as hacking maps that track the spread of the virus or phishing scams related to stimulus checks.  When attackers successfully compromise devices that also access corporate data, that data needs to be considered at-risk.  Companies need to consider who would want access to their proprietary data, especially as state actors such as China, North Korea, and Russia have all been caught trying to infect victims with malware. 

Clear Ridge Defense understands that this increase in telework and people connecting from alternate locations requires businesses to adapt rapidly.  Securing your company’s workforce and the networks they choose to connect to are essential in protecting proprietary information.  This scenario presents a dynamic threat and Clear Ridge Defense is prepared to provide commercial solutions to keep your company secured.  Contact us today. 

Baltimore, MD, May 18, 2020 – In cyberspace, the United States is in daily competition against determined and aggressive adversaries, foreign states, malicious actors, and unscrupulous competitors that seek to gain strategic advantages or to do harm. Similarly, private businesses and commercial entities are at risk with these same threats jeopardizing their corporate welfare, clientele, and sensitive information.

Clear Ridge Defense provides the full spectrum of services in this fight. From commercial cybersecurity consulting and assessments for private businesses and corporate entities to positions within U. S. Cyber Command, Clear Ridge Defense has a technical and strategic talent range that has resulted in accolades from both our commercial and federal clients.

U. S. Cyber Command is maturing its capacity as a Combatant Command. Moving well beyond the technical aspects of the cyber warfighting domain, it is seeking to bolster its capability in certain key strategic areas. Among these are opportunities that Clear Ridge Defense can offer to prospective employees that hold a TS/SCI security clearance and polygraph.

For example, Clear Ridge Defense is looking for talent in key areas of operational design and research, campaign assessments, foreign partner experience (security cooperation, embassy work, etc), legislative affairs, and cyberspace policy.

If you have served on Capitol Hill, at an embassy abroad, or as a planner on a service or combatant command staff, Clear Ridge Defense would love to hear from you.

Clear Ridge Defense was founded in Maryland in 2015. It is a young, energetic company that prides itself on its family-oriented culture, benefits package, excellent compensation, and, most importantly, the quality of its small cadre of talented, experienced professionals placed in key positions.