Welcome to a New Kind of Cyber Community
Today’s fast-paced cyber threat landscape has created incredible demand for quick, high-level analysis of emerging cyber issues. The Cipher Brief’s Cyber Advisory Board is a forum of experienced leaders and influencers from both the public and private sectors who share their perspectives on today’s most pressing cyber threats. We invite experts and guests with unique insight and experience to represent different aspects of the issues up for discussion and then share those insights with subscribers and partners.
Meetings are expertly moderated by General Michael V. Hayden, former Director of the NSA and CIA. The overall goal is to provide a critical forum for productive public-private conversations about how we think about emerging threats, vulnerabilities and policies. For information about becoming a Cyber Advisory Board Subscriber and everything that includes, please click here. For more information on becoming a Cyber Advisory Board Sponsor, please contact Brad Christian at bchristian@thecipherbrief.com.
I hope to see you at a future Cyber Advisory Board meeting.
Suzanne Kelly CEO & Publisher, The Cipher Brief
The Cyber Advisory Board
General Hayden is a retired four-star General in the United States Air Force; he was the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency from 2006-2009 and the Director of the National Security Agency from 1999-2005.
Admiral Winnefeld graduated from the Georgia Institute of Technology and served for 37 years in the United States Navy. He retired in 2015 after serving four years as the ninth Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the United States' number two ranking military officer. As a flag officer, he commanded the Theodore Roosevelt Carrier Strike Group, NATO Joint Command Lisbon, Striking and Support Forces NATO, the United States Sixth Fleet, United States Northern Command, and the North American Aerospace Defense Command, also known as NORAD.
Robert Hannigan was Director of GCHQ, the UK's largest intelligence agency and NSA equivalent from 2014-17. He was a member of the National Security Council. He established the UK's National Cyber Security Centre in 2016 and was responsible, with military colleagues, for the UK's offensive cyber program. He retired recently after a long career in national security, including as Tony Blair's lead official on the Northern Ireland peace process. He was the Prime Minister's Security Adviser from 2007-2010, focusing on Islamist terrorism, and a long-standing member of the UK's Joint Intelligence Committee. He is one of the few non-US nationals to have been awarded the National Intelligence Distinguished Public Service Medal.
Mr. Robert Work was the 31st Deputy Secretary of Defense, serving under three different Secretaries across two administrations. Previously, he served as chief executive officer of the Center for a New American Security. From 2009 to 2013, he served as the Under Secretary of the Navy. Mr. Work served on active duty in the U.S. Marine Corps for 27 years, retiring as a Colonel in 2001. He joined the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in 2002, where he wrote and spoke extensively on defense strategy and programs, revolutions in war, Department of Defense transformation, and maritime affairs. He also was an adjunct professor at The George Washington University.
Matthew Olsen is President for Consulting for IronNet Cybersecurity. Olsen spent over twenty years working for the U.S. government, most recently as the Director of the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC). Prior to his appointment to NCTC, Olsen served as the General Counsel for the National Security Agency and Special Counsel to the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Chris Inglis retired from the Department of Defense in January 2014 following over 41 years of federal service, including 28 years at NSA and seven and a half years as its senior civilian and Deputy Director. Mr. Inglis’ military career includes over 30 years of service in the U.S. Air Force from which he retired as a Brigadier General in 2006. Mr. Inglis currently serves in the U.S. Naval Academy’s Robert and Mary M. Looker Distinguished Chair for Cyber Studies.
Rick Ledgett served as the Deputy Director of the National Security Agency from January 2014 until his retirement in April 2017, culminating a nearly 40 year career in cryptology at NSA and in the U.S. Army. He previously led the Media Leaks Task Force, the Agency's response to the Snowden leaks. He was the first National Intelligence Manager for Cyber at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and he directed NSA's 24/7 cyber threat operations center.
Lt. Gen. James K. "Kevin" McLaughlin served as the Deputy Commander, U.S. Cyber Command (USCYBERCOM) in Fort Meade, Maryland. General McLaughlin entered the Air Force in 1983 as a graduate of the U.S. Air Force Academy. He has commanded at the squadron, group, wing and numbered air force levels and has served on the staffs at major command headquarters, combatant command headquarters, the National Reconnaissance Office, Air Force headquarters, and the Office of the Secretary of Defense. Prior to assuming his current position, General McLaughlin was the Commander, 24th Air Force and Commander, Air Forces Cyber, Joint Base San Antonio - Lackland, Texas.
Thomas Donahue retired from CIA after 32 years of service. He served as the Chief Editor of the President’s Daily Brief and other CIA daily production during the second term of the Clinton administration, and he spent the last 18 years of his career focused on cyber threats as a manager and senior analyst in what is now known as the Center for Cyber Intelligence. He served four years at the White House during the Bush and Obama administrations, most recently as the senior director for cyber operations for the National Security Council staff. During his last two years, he was the research director at the DNI's Cyber Threat Intelligence Integration Center. He has a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from MIT.
Jill Singer leads AT&T business activities serving the Intelligence Community, overseeing the delivery of strategic technology solutions and services to national security agencies throughout the global public sector marketplace. Before joining AT&T, Ms. Singer was a partner with Deep Water Point and CEO of Tummler Singer Associates consulting firm. Her senior government experience includes Chief Information Officer (CIO) for the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), Deputy CIO for the Central Intelligence Agency, and Director of the Diplomatic Telecommunications Service for U.S. Department of State. In addition to her 25-plus years in government, she also held industry positions with Science Applications International Corporation, Inc. (SAIC), GE Aerospace, and IBM.
Raj De recently served as the General Counsel at the National Security Agency, after holding senior appointments in the White House and the Department of Justice. He is currently a partner at Mayer Brown, where he leads the firm's global Cybersecurity and Data Privacy practice.
Robert Griffin is a member of The Cipher Brief's Cyber Advisory Board and CEO of Ayasdi. He is a leader in machine intelligence software and pioneer in enterprise-class intelligent applications. Mr. Griffin joined Ayasdi after 35 years of being a founder and holding CEO positions at technology and software companies. Most recently, he served as the GM of IBM's Safer Planet and Smarter Cities division, which develops solutions to help government and commercial business leaders detect, disrupt and prevent physical and cyber threats and create new cognitive approaches to long-standing urban challenges.
Dmitri Alperovitch is the Co-Founder and CTO of CrowdStrike Inc. In 2016, Alperovitch revealed Russian intelligence agencies' hacking of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), events which unveiled the full scope of cyber influence operations being launched against the 2016 US Election. Alperovitch is currently a Senior Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center’s Defending Digital Democracy Project and a Senior Fellow at Atlantic Council. He has served on the board of Georgia Tech Information Security Center (GTISC) Industry Advisory Board and currently serves on the RSA Conference Advisory Board.
Matt Devost has nearly 20 years of experience working on cybersecurity, counterterrorism, critical infrastructure protection, intelligence, and risk management issues in a variety of government and private sector environments. He is currently the EVP Strategy and Operations as Tulco Holdings. Prior to joining Tulco, Matt was a managing director and led Accenture’s Global Cyber Defense practice. He joined Accenture when they acquired his company FusionX where he was and CEO from 2010-2017. Previously, Devost was President and CEO of the Terrorism Research Center from 1996-2008 and has founded or served in key management positions in companies like Total Intelligence Solutions, iSIGHT Partners, Terrorism Research Center, Technical Defense Associates, Security Design International, and iDEFENSE.
Michael Sulmeyer is the Belfer Center's Cyber Security Project Director at the Harvard Kennedy School. He is also a Contributing Editor for Lawfare. Before Harvard, he served as the Director for Plans and Operations for Cyber Policy in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. There, he worked closely with the Joint Staff and Cyber Command on a variety of efforts to counter malicious cyber activity against U.S. and DoD interests. For this work, he received the Secretary Medal for Exceptional Public Service. Previously, he worked on arms control and the maintenance of strategic stability between the United States, Russia, and China.
Jason Healey is a Cipher Brief Cyber Advisor and Senior Research Scholar at Columbia University’s School for International and Public Affairs, and Visiting Scholar at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, specializing in cyber conflict and risk. He started his career as a U.S. Air Force intelligence officer, before moving to cyber response and policy jobs at the White House and Goldman Sachs. Healey was founding director for cyber issues at the Atlantic Council where he remains a Senior Fellow and is the editor of the first history of conflict in cyberspace, A Fierce Domain: Cyber Conflict, 1986 to 2012. He is on the DEF CON review board and served on the Defense Science Board task force on cyber deterrence.
Neal is a Principal (Partner) at PricewaterhouseCoopers, where he leads PwC’s national Cyber Incident Readiness practice. Neal also leads incident response and investigation services for PwC’s New York Metro offices, and PwC’s Financial Crimes Unit. Prior to joining PwC, Neal was a senior officer in the U.S. intelligence community, and served multiple managerial and operational counterterrorism assignments in the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Counterterrorism Center. He was also Director for Counterterrorism on the staff of the Commission on the Prevention of WMD Proliferation and Terrorism (Graham-Talent Commission). Prior to government service, he was Board Director and General Counsel of the Terrorism Research Center, Inc., a corporation he co-founded in 1996. He also was Vice President at Hicks & Associates, Inc., where he founded their counterterrorism and homeland security practice.
Bob Gourley is founder of the technology due diligence consultancy Crucial Point, where he provides CTO services and cybersecurity assessments in support of M&A transactions. Bob’s first career was as a naval intelligence officer, which included operational tours in Europe and Asia. Bob was the Director of Intelligence (J2) at DoD’s first operational cyber defense organization JTF-CND. Following retirement from the Navy, Bob was an executive with TRW and Northrop Grumman, and then returned to government service as the CTO of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). Bob was named one of the top 25 most influential CTOs in the globe by Infoworld and was named by Washingtonian as one of DC’s “Tech Titans.” Bob’s most recent book, The Cyber Threat, provides business executives with actionable insights into the threat landscape.
Nils Puhlmann is the former CSO & CTO and the Co-Founder of the Cloud Security Alliance. He is the former Chief Security Officer of Zynga, and was formerly Chief Security Officer at Qualys, and Chief Information Security Officer of Electronic Arts and Robert Half International. Puhlmann serves on the Board of Directors of Open Vulnerability and Assessment Language (OVAL) and is an Advisory Board member for several security companies.