 Live from Washington, D.C., it's theCUBE, covering AWS Public Sector Summit. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. Welcome back, everyone, to theCUBE's live coverage of the AWS Public Sector Summit here in Washington, D.C. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, coasting alongside of John Furrier. We are excited to welcome to the program General Keith Alexander, former NSA director, the first commander to lead the U.S. Cyber Command, four-star general with a 40-year career. Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. We are honored, we're honored to have you. I'm honored to be here, thank you. So let's talk about cyber threats. Let's start there, and have you just give us your observations, your thoughts on what are the most pressing cyber threats that keep you up at night? Well, so when you think about threats, you think about nation states, so you can go to Iran, Russia, China, North Korea, and then you think about criminal threats, all the things like ransomware. Some of the nation-state actors are also criminals at night, so they can use nation-state tools, and my concern about all the evolution of cyber threats is that the attacks are getting more destructive, the malware has more legs with worms, and the impact on our commercial sector and our nation increasingly bigger. So you have all those from cyber, and then I think the biggest impact to our country is the theft of intellectual property, right? That's our future. So you look out on this floor here, think about all the technical talent. Now imagine that every idea that we have, somebody else is stealing, making a product out of it, competing with us and beating us. That's kind of what Huawei did, taking Cisco code to make Huawei, and now they're racing down that road. So we have a couple of big issues here to solve. Protect our future, that intellectual property. Stop the theft of money and other ideas, and protect our nation. So when you think about cyber, that's what I think about going through. Oftentimes we'll talk about the nation-state threat, the most prevalent threat, just criminal threat, and the most, I think, right now important for us strategically is the theft of intellectual property. So why don't we just have a digital force to counter all this? Why doesn't we take the same approach we did when we celebrated the 75th anniversary of D-Day, World War II, that just was recently in the news. That's a physical war. We have a digital war happening, whether you call it or not. I think it is, and personally in my opinion, I think it is, you're seeing the misinformation campaigns, financial institutions leaving England like it's nobody's business. I mean, he crippled the entire UK. That could be the hack, who knows, but it's happening digitally. Where's the forces? Is that cyber command? So that's cyber command, but you bring out an important issue. And protecting the nation, the reason we stood up cyber command, not just to get me promoted, but that was a good outcome. But it was actually, how do we defend the country? How do we defend ourselves in cyber? So you need a force to do it. So you're right, you need a force. That force is cyber command. There's an issue though. Cyber command cannot see today attacks on our country. So they're left to try to go after the offense, but all the offense has to do is hit over here. They're looking at these sets of targets. They don't see the attacks. So they wouldn't have seen the attack on Sony. They don't see these devastating attacks. They don't see the thefts. So the real solution to what you bring up is make it visible. Make it so our nation can defend itself in cyber by seeing the attacks that are hitting us. That should help us protect companies and sectors and help us share that information. It has to be at speed. So we talk about sharing, but it's senseless for me to send you for air traffic control a letter that a plane is located overhead. You get it in the mail seven days later, you think, well... You're late. That's too late. You're fighting blindfolded. That's right. So you can't do either. And so what it gets you to is we have to create the new norm for visibility in cyberspace. This does a whole host of things. And you were good to bring out. It's also fake news. It's also deception. It's all these other things that are going on. We have to make that visible. How do you do that though? Do you do? I do find that. So the way you do it, I think is a start at the beginning. What's happening to the network? How do you... So on building a defensible framework, you've got to be able to see the attacks, not what you expect, but all the attacks. So that's anomaly detection. So that's one of the things we have to do. And then you have to share that at network speed. And then you have to have a machine learning expert system AI to help you go at the speeds the attacker's going to go at. On fake news, this is a big problem. This has been throughout time. Somebody pointed out about George Washington. Seven fake letters written to say, oh no, I think the king's good. He never wrote that. And the reason that countries do it, like Russia, in the elections, is to change something to more beneficial for them. Or at least what they believe is more beneficial. It is interesting. MIT has done some studies, so I've heard on this, and that people are 70% more likely to retweet, retweet fake news than they are the facts. So... Because it's more sensational. Because it's good for you in a way, you know? But it's tasty. Look at the set. It's kind of something that you want to talk about. Can you believe what these guys are doing? That's outrageous. Retreat, because it's not true. Oh yeah, but it makes me mad just thinking about it. So you get people going, and you think, you know, it's like going into a bar, and you go to him, he thinks you're ugly, and you go to me, you go, he thinks you're ugly. And so we get going, and you started it, and we didn't even talk. Right, right. And so that's what Russia does. At scale, too. At the scale. So part of the solution to that is understanding where information's coming from, being able to see the environment like you do the physical environment at speed. I think step one, if I were to pick out the logical sequence of what'll happen, we'll get to a defensible architecture over the next year or two. We're already starting to see that with other sectors, so I think we can get there. As soon as you do that, now you're into, now how do I know that this news is real? It's kind of like a blockchain for facts. How do we now do that in this way? We've got to figure that out. We're doing our part there, but I want to get back to this topic of infrastructure because digital, okay, there's roads, there's digital roads, there's packets moving around, you mentioned Huawei ripping off Cisco, which takes their R&D and puts it in their pockets, that's how I get that. But when you look at fake news and other things, you've got payload, content or payload, and then you've got infrastructure distribution. So we're getting at here is that there are literally roads and bridges and digital construction apparatus, infrastructure that needs to be understood, addressed, monitored, or reset, because you have email, it's been around for a while, but these are new kinds of infrastructure, but the payload, malware, fake news, whatever it is, there's an interaction between payload and infrastructure. Your thoughts and reaction to that as a commander and thinking about how to combat all this? My gut reaction is that you're going to have to change, we will have to change how we think about that. It's not anymore roads and avenues in, it's all the environment. You know, it's like this whole thing. Now the whole world is open up, it's like the matrix. You open it up and there it is, it's everything. So what we have to do is think about, well, if it's everything, how do we now operate in a world where you have both truths and fiction? That's the harder problem. So that's why I say if we solve the first problem, we're so far along on establishing perhaps the level, so it raises us up to a level where we're now securing it, where we can begin to see now the ideas for the pedigree of information I think will come out. If you think about the amount of unique information created every year, there are did you know videos that claim it's doubling every year or more? If that's true, in half of 70% of its fiction, we've got a big road to go. And you know, there is a lot of fiction out there. So we've got to fix that. And the unfortunate part is both sides of that, both the fiction and the finding the fiction has consequences because somebody says that A wasn't true. That person, you know, they say it was a rapist, it was a robber, he was a drugger. And then they found out it was all fake, but he still has that stigma. And then the person over here says, see, they accused me of that. They're out to get me in other areas. They can claim people. But sometimes the person saying that is also a person who has a lot of power in our government, who's saying that it's fake news, when it's not fake news, or you know what I... So that's part of the issue, some of it is fake. Some of it's not. And that's what makes it so difficult for the public. So you can say that piece was fake, maybe not the other six, but the reality is, and I think this is where the media can really help. This is where you can help. How do we set up the fact? And I think that's the hardest part. That's the truth. The data is, it's a data problem. And we've talked about this off camera in the past. Data is critical for the systems to work, be the visibility of the data, having contextual data, the behavioral data. This gets to a lot of the consequences. I mean, there's real consequences to this. One, theft, IP, freedom, lives. And I was, my son was video gaming the other day. I could hear his friends all talking, what's your ping server? What's your ping time? I got lag, I'm dead. This is a video game, okay? Military, lagging, this is not a game. People are losing their lives, potentially if they don't have the right tactical edge access to technology. I know this is near and dear to your heart. I want to get your reaction. The Department of Defense is deploying strategies to make our military in the field, which represents 85% infantry, I believe some statistic around that number, is relying on equipment. Technology can help solve that. Your thoughts on, so I think going to the cloud, their effort to go to the cloud is a great step forward because it addresses just what you're saying. You know, everybody used to have their own data centers, but a data center has a fixed amount of computational capability. Once you reach it, you either have to get another data center or you just live with what you've got. In the cloud, if the problem's bigger, elasticity, just add more cores. And you can do things now that we could never do before. And perhaps even more importantly, you can make the clouds global. And you can see around the world, now you're talking about encrypted data, you're talking about ensuring that you have a level of encryption that you need, accesses and stuff. But for mobile forces, that's the future. You don't carry a data center around with a infantry battalion. So you want that elasticity and you need the connectivity and you need the training to go with it. And the training gets you to what we were just talking about. When somebody serves up something wrong, and this happened to me in combat in Desert Storm. We were launched on, everybody was getting ready to launch on something. And I said, this doesn't sound right. And I told the division commander, I don't agree. I think this is crazy. The Iraqis are not attacking us down this line. I think it's old news. I think somebody's taken an old report that we had. And now we read it and said, oh my God, they're coming. And when we found out that was a J-star, remember how the J-star's MTI thing would off of a wire, would look like a convoy. And that's what it was. So you have to have both. You're on the cusp of an attack deploying troops. That's right. On fake information, or misinfra... Not misinfra... Not accurate information. Old information. Old information. Old fake. It's all not relevant. And what happens... It's not relevant. Yeah, well what happens is somebody interprets that to be true. So it gets back to you. How do you interpret the information? So there's training. It's a healthy dose of skepticism. You know, there aren't aliens in this room. Well, maybe not. So... As far as we know. As far as we know. I mean, tested everybody. But I mean, what a fascinating anecdote you just told about being in Desert Storm and having this report come in. You saying, guys, this doesn't sound right. I mean, how often do you harken back to your experience in the military and when you were actually in combat versus what you're doing today in terms of thinking about these threats? Well, I'm not. You know, because in the military, when you have troops in danger, your first thought is, how can I do more? How can I do better? What can I do to get them the intelligence they need? And you can innovate. And pressure is a great innovator. And it was amazing. And our division commander, General Griffith was all into that. He said, I trust you do whatever you want. And we, it was amazing. So I think that's a good thing. Note that when you go back and look at military campaigns, there's always this thing. The victor writes the history. So, you know, hopefully the victor will write the truthful history. But that's not always the case. Sometimes history is rewritten to be more like what they would like it to be. So this fake news isn't new. This is something though where, I think, journalists, historians, and others can come together and say, you know, that don't make sense, let's get the facts. But there's so much pressure on journalists today in this 24 hour news cycle where you're not only expected to write the story, but you're expected to be tweeting about it, to do a podcast about it later to get that first draft of history right. Right, so it may be part of that is, as the reporter's saying it, you know, to step back and say, here's what we've been told. You know, we used to call those a certain type of sandwich. Not a good, so many certain stuff, one of these S sandwiches, one of these S sandwiches. So you're getting fed that, you're thinking, you know, this doesn't make sense. This time and day that this would occur. So while we've heard this report, it's sensational, we need to go get the facts. And that's one of the areas that I think we really got to work. It's journalism's changing too, I can tell you. From our, we've talked, data drives us, we've no advertising, completely different model, in-depth interviews, the truth is out there. The key is, how do you get the truth in context to real time information for those late opportunities? Well I want to get before you go and thanks for coming on and spending the time. General, appreciate it. Your company that you formed, IronNet, okay, you're applying a lot of your discipline and knowledge in military cyber and cutting edge tech. Tell us about your company. So one of the things that we brought up and discussed here, when I had Cyber Command, one of the frustrations that I discussed with both Secretary Gates and Secretary Panetta, we can't see attacks on our country. And that's the commercial sector needs to help go fix that. The government can't fix that. So my thought was now that I'm in the commercial sector, I'll help fix the ability to see attacks on the commercial sector so we can share it with the government. What that entails is creating a behavioral analytic system that creates events, anomalies, an expert system with machine learning and AI that helps you understand what's going on and the ability to correlate and then give that to the government so they can see that picture. So they have a chance of defending our country. So step one is doing that. Now, truth in lending, it's a lot harder than I thought it would be. You know, I had this great saying, how hard, nothing's too hard for those of us who don't have to do it. How hard can this be? Those are two of my favorite things. Now that I have to do it, I can say it's hard, but it's doable. We can do this. And it's going to take some time. We are getting traction. The energy sector has been great to work with in this area. I think within a year, what we deploy with the companies and what we push up to the cloud and the ability to now start sharing that with the government will change the way we think about cybersecurity. I think it's a disruptor. And we have to do that because that's the way they're going to attack us with AI. We have to have a fast system to defend. I know you got to go tight schedule here, but I want to get one quick question in. I know you're not a policy, you know, wonk as they say or expert. Well, you probably are an expert in policy. But if we can get a redo on reshaping policy to enable these hard problems to be solved by entrepreneurs like yourself, expertise that are coming into the space quickly with ideas to solve these big problems. Whether it's fake news, do understanding attacks. What do the policy makers need to do to get out of the way? Do they rip up everything? Do they reshape it? What's your vision on this? What's your opinion? I think, and I think the acting Secretary of Defense is taking this on in others. We've got to have a way of quickly going this technology changes every two years or better. Our acquisition cycle is in many years. Continue to streamline the acquisition process. Break through that. Trust that the military and civilian leaders will do the right thing. Hold them accountable. You know, making a mistake. You know, Amazon, Jeff Bezos has a great thing. Go quickly to failure so we can get to success. And we in the military say, if you fail, you're a dummy. No, no, try it. If it doesn't work, go on to success. So don't crush somebody because they failed because they're going to succeed at some point. Try and try again. Perseverance, so I think a couple of things. Ensure we fix the acquisition process, streamline it, and allow commanders and thought leaders the flexibility and agility to bring in the technology and ideas we need to make this a better military, a better intelligence community, and a better country. We can do this. All right, all right. I'm not thinking Rosie the Riveter. We can do this. We can do it, we just did it. General Alexander, thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you. I'm Rebecca Knight for John Furrier. Stay tuned for more of theCUBE.