Vanguard Magazine

28 DECEMBER 2023/JANUARY 2024 www.vanguardcanada.com G A M E C H A N G E R See the full interview online Q How did you start out in this industry and how has it brought you to where you are today? I began my military career as an Infan- try officer, following my graduation from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in 1980. In the mid 90s, I became in- volved in Information Warfare and led those efforts for the Joint Special Opera- tions Command (JSOC) and U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM) from 1998-2006. As part of that role, I was in- volved in cyber operations, but mostly on the offensive side. In 2012, I was promoted to Major Gen- eral and became the first Senior Military Cyber Advisor at the Pentagon. In 2014 I was simultaneously appointed the acting Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Cyber Policy and was responsible for DoD cyber policy, strategy, interagency cyber coordination, international cyber coop- eration activities and interaction with the U.S. Defense Industrial Base on cyberse- curity issues. After retiring from the mili- tary in 2015, I joined Palo Alto Networks and have been here ever since. Q What is your role at your organization today? I help our clients improve their cyberse- curity posture by creating and maintain- ing trusted advisory relationships with their executives and security leaders, sharing the cybersecurity lessons learned and best practices from both my military and industry experiences, and generally helping them solve their cybersecurity related challenges. Q What was your most challenging moment? Shortly after I was promoted to Briga- dier General and assigned as the leader of a Joint Task Force responsible for directing the operations and defense of DoD's networks worldwide, our intel- ligence community discovered a very serious cyber "infection" in some of the department's most sensitive networks, including those supporting our opera- tional combat units in Iraq and Afghani- stan. The infection was spreading across all of DoD's networks. This particular malicious software was assessed as putting the integrity of our most sensitive networks at risk, and the entire DoD began an operation to find it by examining every piece of hardware and software related to military networks around the world, eliminate it from all networks and equipment wherever it was discovered, and verify that no sensitive information from our sensitive networks was exposed to the internet. As you might imagine, this was the most enormously challenging and con- sequential cyber-related moment of my life…a moment that lasted for many months, years and the result is still rever- berating to this day for the U.S. military in the evolution of U.S. Cyber Com- mand and all its Service and Joint Com- ponent Cyber Commands and Agencies. Q What was your A-HA moment or epiphany that you think will resonate most with our readers? Tell us that story. When I first became involved in the cy- ber realm, most of the cyber threats were characterized as either criminal-related or because of our adversaries' espionage ef- forts to steal information from govern- ment, military, industry, and even people in order to gain an advantage of some type. This evolved over time and in the 90's spying began to change. Activities such as distributed denial of service (called DDoS) and other disruptive actions be- gan to become one of the tools of choice for criminal and government cyber actors as well as hacktivists. Later, we began to see another disturbing outcome added as an arrow in the cyber actor's quiver. De- struction became a motivation, with dire consequences in some cases. However, the trend over the years from concerns about protecting the confidenti- ality of important information against cy- ber activities associated with the stealing for profit or to gain intelligence, to con- cerns about the availability of information and services from disruptive and destruc- tive cyber activities, became especially alarming in the context of the potential for significant consequences to national and international critical infrastructure and even military response capabilities. Q How has innovation become engrained in your organization's culture and how is it being optimized? I believe that the innovative spirit is em- bedded within the individual values and organizational culture at Palo Alto Net- works. It has been built from the bottom up and inspired from the top down. Our teammates regularly and reward the inno- vative spirit, as well as the other individual values that make up our corporate culture such as execution, integrity, collaboration, customer first, and disruption, through a democratic process where any employee can send congratulatory "points" to any- one else that has demonstrated a particu- larly noteworthy value. JOHN DAVIS VICE PRESIDENT, PUBLIC SECTOR PALO ALTO NETWORKS

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