Risky Business Podcast

February 05, 2019

Risky Business #529 -- Special guest Rob Joyce, NSA

Presented by

Patrick Gray
Patrick Gray

CEO and Publisher

Adam Boileau
Adam Boileau

Technology Editor

There’s no news segment in this week’s show. Instead, you’re going to hear a long-form feature interview I did with the NSA’s Rob Joyce.

Rob is probably best known for his tenure as special assistant to the president on cybersecurity and for being the cybersecurity coordinator on the US National Security Council.

He also served as acting homeland security advisor to Donald Trump for a short time following the departure of Tom Bossert from the Whitehouse. In May last year he went back to NSA where he now serves as a senior advisor to the director of NSA for Cyber Security strategy.

Some of you may also know Rob for his blockbuster January 2016 conference talk “disrupting nation state hackers” back when he was heading TAO at NSA. Good talk, that one, and it’s on YouTube. (Link below.)

But gradually over the last couple of years Rob has emerged as a sort of friendly-face of NSA, at least as far as the infosec industry is concerned. He’s spoke at DEF CON last year, he often appears at events and on panels and he’s doesn’t seem terrified of actually comment on things.

This is a huge departure from the historical way agencies like NSA handled themselves. But as you’ll hear, Rob sees this new approach as being vital to the NSA’s current-day mission.

Topics covered include:

  • DoJ indictments of foreign gov hackers
  • 5G networks and Huawei
  • Kaspersky AV
  • Bloomberg’s Supermicro story
  • Software and hardware supply chain security
  • The USG aggressively burning adversary tools

We also have a sponsor interview for you this week with Zane Lackey, the co-founder of Signal Sciences. I guess you’d call these guys “next generation WAF,” more on that later… but Zane will be along a little bit later with some pretty incredible stats on the way security spending has changed over the last year or two. Money is just piling into appsec while spending on some other controls is actually reducing. It’s a sign of change.

Risky Business #529 -- Special guest Rob Joyce, NSA
0:00 / 0:00