 Welcome to theCUBE's continuous coverage of AWS re-invent 2021. I'm Dave Nicholson and we are running one of the industry's most important and largest hybrid tech events this year with AWS and its partners with two live sets on the scene in addition to two remote studios. And we'll have somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred guests on the program this year at re-invent. I'm extremely delighted to welcome a very, very special guest right now. He served as the director of the NSA under two presidents and was the first commander of the US cyber command. He's a CUBE alumni. He's founder and co-CEO of Iron Net Cyber Security, General Keith Alexander. Thanks for joining us today, General. Thanks, David. It's an honor to be here at re-invent with AWS, all that they're doing and all they're making possible for us to defend sector, states, companies and nations in cyber. So an honor to be here. Well, welcome back to theCUBE. Let's dive right in. I'd like to know how you would describe the current cyber threat landscape that we face. Well, I think it's growing. Well, let's start right out. You know, the good news or the bad news, the bad news, it's getting worse. We're seeing that. If you think about solar winds, you think about the half-nume attacks on Microsoft. You think about this rapid growth and ransomware. We're seeing criminals and nation-states engaging in ways that we've never seen in the past. It's more blatant. They're going after more quickly. They're using cyber as an element of national power. Let's break that down just a little bit. If you go back to two July, Xi Jinping talked about breaking heads in bloodshed when he was referring to the United States and Taiwan. And this has gone hot and cold. That's a red line for him. They will do anything to keep Taiwan from breaking away. And this is a huge existential threat to us and to the region. And when this comes up, they're going to use cyber to go after it. Perhaps even more important and closer right now is what's going on with Russia in the Donbass region of Eastern Ukraine. We saw this in 2014 when Russia took over the Crimea, the way they did it, staging troops. They did that in 2008 against Georgia. And now there are, by some reports, over 100,000 troops on the border of Eastern Ukraine. Some call that an exercise. But that's exactly what they did in Georgia. That's what they did in the Crimea. And in both those cases, they preceded those attacks, those physical attacks with cyber attacks. And if you go to 2017, when Russia hit the Ukrainian government with the Knot-Petchett attack, that had global repercussions. Russia was responsible for SolarWinds. They have attacked our infrastructure to find out what our government is doing. And they continue to go, this is getting worse. You know, it's interesting when you think about, so what do you do about something like that? How do we stop that? And the answer is we've got to work together. You know, it's the SLAM commission addressed it, the meeting with the president on August 25th. There's a great statement by the CEO and chairman of Southern Company, Tom Fanning. He said this, the war is being waged on our nation's critical infrastructure. In particular, our energy sector, our telecommunications sector and financial sector. The private sector owns and operates 87% of the critical infrastructure in the United States, making collaboration between industry and the federal government imperative to thwart these attacks. General, I want to dig just a little bit on that point that you make. For generations, people have understood, you know, the term is kinetic war, right? Not everyone has heard that phrase, but for generations, we've understood the concept of someone dropping a bomb on a building as being an attack. You've just mentioned that a lot of these attacks are directed towards the private sector. The private sector doesn't have an army to respond to those attacks. Number one, that's our government's responsibility. So the question I have is, how seriously are people taking these kinds of threats when compared to the threat of kinetic war? Because my gosh, you can take down the entire electrical grid now. That's not something you can do with a single bomb. What are your thoughts on that? So you're hitting on a key point, a theoretical and an operational point. If you look back, what's the intent of warfare? It's to get the mass of people to give up. The army protects the mass of people in that fight. In cyber, there's no protection. Our critical infrastructure is exposed to our adversaries. That's the problem that we face. And because it's exposed, we have a tremendous vulnerability. So those who wish us harm, imagine the colonial pipeline attack in order of magnitude or two order of magnitude is bigger. The impact on our country would paralyze much of what we do today. We are not ready for that. That's the issue that Tom Fanning and others have brought up. We don't practice between the public sector and the private sector working together to defend this country. We need to do that. That's the issue that we have to really get our hands around. And when we talk about practice, what do we mean? It means we have to let the federal government, the ones who are going to protect us, see what's going on. There is no radar picture. Now, since we're at reinvent, that cloud, what AWS and others have done is create the infrastructure that allows us to build that bridge between the public and private sector and scale. It's amazing what we can now do. We couldn't do that when I was running Cyber Command. And running Cyber Command, we couldn't see threats on the government. And we couldn't see threats on critical infrastructure. We couldn't see threats on the private sector. And so it all went, and all the government did was say, after the fact, you've been attacked. That's not helpful. It's like they dropped a bomb, we didn't know. Yeah, so what is IronNet doing to kind of create this radar capability? So, well, thanks. That's a great question because there's four things that you really got to do. First, you've got to be able to detect the solar winds type attacks, which we did. You've got to have a hunt platform that can see what it is. You've got to be able to use machine learning and AI to really cut down the number of events. And the most important, you need to be able to anonymize and share that into the cloud and see where those attacks are going to create that radar picture. So behavioral analytics, and you use signature base as well, but you need those sets of analytics to really see what's going on. Machine learning AI, a hunt platform, and cloud, and then analytics in the cloud to see what's going on, creates that air traffic control picture, radar picture for cyber, that's what we're doing. You see, I think that's the important part and that's why we really value the partnership with AWS. They've been a partner with us for six years, helping us build through that. You can see what we could do in the cloud we could never do in hardware alone. Just imagine trying to push out equipment and do that for hundreds of companies. It's not viable. So SaaS, what we are as a SaaS company, you can now do that at scale and you can push this out and we can create. We can defend this nation and cyber if we work together. And that's the thing. You know, I really had a great time in the military. One of the things I learned in the military, you need to train how you're going to fight. They're really good at that. We did that in the 80s and you can see what happened in 1990 in the Gulf War. We need to now do that between the public and private sector. We have to have those training. We need to continuously uplift our capabilities and that's where the cloud and all these other things make that possible. That's the future of cybersecurity. You know, it's interesting, David. Our country developed the internet. We're the ones that pioneered that. We ought to be the first to secure it. Seems to make sense. And when you talk about collective defense and this private public partnership that needs to happen, you get examples of some folks in private industry and what they're doing. But talk a little bit more about maybe what isn't happening yet. What do we need to do? I don't want you to necessarily get political and start making budgetary suggestions but unless you want to. But where do you see, where do we really need to push forward from a public perspective in order to make these connections? And then how does that connection actually happen? This isn't someone from the IronNet security service desk getting on a red phone and calling the White House. How are the actual connections made? So it has to be, the connections have to be just like we do radar. You know, when you think about radars across our nation, a radar operator doesn't call up one of the towers and say, you've got an aircraft coming at you at such and such a speed. I hope you can distinguish between those two aircraft and make sure they don't bump into each other. They get a picture and they get a way of tracking it and multiple people can see that radar picture at speed. And that's how we do air traffic control safety. We need the same thing in cyber where the government has a picture, the private sector has a picture and they can see what's going on. The private sector's role is, I'm going to do everything I can. You know, and this is where the energy sector, I use that quote from Tom Tanning because what they're saying is, it's our job to keep the grid up and they're putting the resources to do it. So they're actually jumping on that in a great way. And what they're saying is, we'll share that with the government, both the DHS and DOD. Now we have to have that same picture created for DHS and DOD. I think one of the things that we're doing is we're pioneering the building of that picture. So that's what we do. We build the picture to bring people together. So think of that as, that's the capability. Everybody's going to own a piece of that and everybody's going to be operating in it. But if you can share that picture, what you can begin to do is say, I've got an attack coming against company A. Company A now sees what it has to do. It can get fellow companies to help them defend, collective defense, knowledge sharing, crowdsourcing. At the same time, the government can see that attack going on and say, my job is to stop that. If it's DHS, I could see what I have to do within the country. DOD can say, my job is to shoot the archers. How do we go do what we're authorized to do under rules of engagement? So now you have a way of the government and the private sector working together to create that picture, then we train on and we train on. We should never have had an event like SolarWinds happen in the future. We've got to get out in front. And if we do that, think of the downstream consequences. Not only can we detect who's doing it, we can hold them accountable and make them pay a price. Right now it's pretty free. They get in, oh, that didn't work, we get away free. That didn't work, we get away free. Oh, we broke in. We got what, 18,000 companies and 30,000 companies. No consequences. In the future, there should be consequences. And in addition to the idea of consequences, you know, in the tech sector, we have this concept of co-operative, where we're often cooperating and competing. The adversaries from a U.S. perspective are also great partners, trading partners. So in a sense, it sounds like what you're doing is also kind of adhering to the old adage that good fences make for great neighbors. If we all know that our respective infrastructures are secure, we can sort of get on with the honest business of being partners. Because you want to make the cost of cyber war too expensive. Is that a fair statement? Yes, and I would take that analogy and bend it slightly to the following. Today, every company defends itself. So you take 90 companies with 10 people each doing everything they can to defend themselves. Imagine in the world where we're trying to build those 90 companies work together, you have now 900 people working together for the collective defense. If you're in the C-suite or the board of those companies, which would you rather have 900 helping you secure it or 10, this isn't hard. And so it's yes, that Neighborhood Watch program for cyber has tremendous value. And beyond Neighborhood Watch, I can also share collaboration because I might not have the best people in every area of cyber, but in those 900 there will be and we can share knowledge crowdsource. So it's actually let's work together. I would call it Americans working together to defend America. That's what we need to do. And the states are going to have a similar thing, what they're doing. And that's how we'll work this together. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. General Alexander, it's been a pleasure. Thanks so much for coming onto the Cube as part of our 2021 AWS re-invent coverage. Are you going to get a chance to spend time during the conference in Las Vegas? Are you just flying in, flying out? Any chance? I'm not sure yet. We're still negotiating working that. I've registered, but I just don't know. I'm in New York City for two meetings and see if I can get to Las Vegas. A lot of friends, Adam Sileski and the entire AWS team, they're amazing. We really like this partnership. I'd love to see you there. Are you going to be there, David? Absolutely, yes, absolutely. And I look forward to that. So hopefully we get that chance. Again, thank you so much, General Alexander. And also thank you to our title sponsor AMD for sponsoring this year's re-invent. Keep it right here for more action on the Cube, your leader in hybrid tech event coverage. I'm Dave Nicholson for the Cube. Thanks.