After more than three decades serving in federal technology and cybersecurity, I thought my next chapter would be retirement. I joined AttackIQ instead because I believe federal cyber defense has reached an inflection point: agencies need to move beyond periodic assessments and assumptions about security effectiveness toward continuous, evidence-based validation against the threats they actually face.
How Federal Cybersecurity Has Changed
For nearly my entire adult life, I have devoted my professional energy to helping develop, implement, and secure the networks used to support and defend our Nation.
I started as a young engineer with the Naval Research Lab, developing tactical communications for our Fleet. In the early days, this was easy. We encrypted point-to-point communications links between systems using NSA-developed cryptographic devices.
But technology evolved. We moved from point-to-point communications between teletypes, to military-unique networking and computing systems, and finally to the TCP/IP stack and commercial off-the-shelf computing. With this evolution, cybersecurity and the threats posed by nation-state adversaries became significantly more complex.
What I Learned Defending Networks at Scale
Later, I was appointed to the Senior Executive Service at the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) and took over responsibility for engineering the Department of War’s (DoW) global network. By then, cybersecurity had become an overriding concern for DISA, DoW, and the Nation.
The United States has always had the best people and leading-edge security technologies developed by world-class technology companies, but our adversaries also conduct incredibly well-funded, highly organized campaigns to disrupt and penetrate our networks every second of every day. Their cyber capabilities are near peers to those of the United States. And as we have learned, painfully, defenders face an unforgiving reality: even a small mistake or gap can create an opportunity for an adversary and open the door to a network breach.
Why AI Changes the Cyber Defense Equation
Now AI is changing the equation again. Attackers can use AI to accelerate and scale elements of the attack lifecycle, increasing the pressure on defenders to know whether their security controls will work when they are needed.
That makes continuous validation increasingly important. Federal security teams cannot rely solely on what a control is configured to do or what an assessment showed months ago. They need evidence that their defenses are working against the threats they face.
Why I Chose AttackIQ
I had reached the point where I was ready to retire completely. I was looking forward to spending my days riding motorcycles, enjoying my family, playing with my grandkids, and traveling.
Then Carl Wright, Chief Commercial Officer at AttackIQ, called.
Carl approached me about an opportunity to help the Defense, Intelligence Community, and civilian federal organizations continuously validate their defenses against real-world adversary behavior, identify the attack paths and defensive gaps that matter most, prioritize the actions required to secure their networks, and even automate the remediation of vulnerabilities.
This approach, known as Adversarial Exposure Validation (AEV), gives security teams continuous evidence of how their defenses will perform against the threats that matter to their mission. DISA is already putting this approach into practice at significant scale, recently selecting AttackIQ to support enterprise-wide AEV across the Department.
I have known Carl for over 30 years. We met when I was a young Navy engineer and he was a Marine data communications officer. Together, we helped build some of the Navy and Marine Corps’ earliest cybersecurity programs.
More than three decades later, Carl was asking me to return to a familiar mission from a very different vantage point. I agreed.
One More Opportunity to Serve the Mission
When Carl offered me the role of Federal Field CTO, he made me only one promise: I would drive the adoption of technology that can strengthen the Warfighter’s ability to operate and prevail in an increasingly contested cyber environment.
Thank you, my friend Carl, for one last opportunity to help the Nation.
