Cyber’s Final Frontier with Joe Mazur (VP, Nightwing)

0:00You have the director of the National Reconistants Office. Somebody asked him, when you were the director, what were you most worried about? And he said cyber. He wasn't worried about a cyber attack against a spacecraft. He was worried about a cyber attack against his mission. The biggest problem is if somebody gets into your network, then they start to move through it laterally. You got to shut that down. It's not something that can happen over days or a week anymore. It's got to happen within hours or even minutes. Maybe 10 years ago, if you were attacked, the first thing to do is to, you know, unplug your computer.

0:29That can't happen anymore. I mean, you can't take down a warfighting system. You've got to be resilient, fight through it, keep the network up.

0:36Joe Mazur: My guess would be in a real space conflict, the first shot is going to be a cyber-bullying shot versus a kinetic attack. Where do you think something like a space Pearl Harbor fits into the probabilities over the next like 5, 10 years?

0:58Joe Mazur: Welcome to Valley of Death. This episode is presented in partnership with Nightwing, a cybersecurity and intelligence company working across some of the most critical national security missions. Today, I'm joined by Joe Mazur, Nightwing's Vice President of Space Systems and a former Air Force officer whose career has spanned the National Reconnaissance Office, DARPA, and programs, including the X-37B. We get into the rapidly changing cyber threat to America's space architecture, why the ground system may be the biggest vulnerability, whether proliferated constellations actually make us more secure, how AI is pushing cyber warfare towards machine-on-machine speed, and what a potential space Pearl Harbor could look like.

1:37Joe Mazur: All that and much, much more. Let's get started. Joe, thanks so much for joining us on Cybersecurity Awareness month. Right. All month, October. Yeah. Well, okay. So tell me a little bit about this because I just, you just described to me what this is and I would love, I mean, you know, nowadays there's, I feel like there's months and celebrations and days for a whole host of things, but why is it so important? Like what in your mind? Yeah, I think it's a good time for people to think about, you know, cyber resilience and basically be prepared. Right. I mean, I was reading in the paper this weekend that I think it was in France that some of the stores there had the refrigerator systems go down.

2:20And then just a couple of weeks ago here in the United States, I'm in the military or retired military. And so we use the commissary. The commissaries storage systems were put in a defrost mode somehow in a cyber attack. I mean, these things happen. And so, you know, it's going to be more prevalent going forward. And you could just give up, right? Or you can start to do some vulnerability assessments, and you can look at where, you know, you have attack surfaces and try to close them, right? And things are going to happen faster and faster. And so, you know, it's a good time to think about it.

2:57Joe Mazur: Now, okay, so the idea of cybersecurity is certainly not new. It's been around for many years, many decades. Do you feel like there's been a recent acceleration or explosion of these types of attacks and vulnerabilities? And if so, why? Well, I mean, we know that AI, right? You're hearing about these frontier models and their capability to find zero dates and then exploit them. And so my opinion is that we're going to get into this machine versus machine where companies like Nightwing are going to also use AI and we're going to be developing cyber defense. And the days where you would find a vulnerability and you'd have two weeks to go have meetings and build a program and then you go put out a fix for it, that's over.

3:45So they're going to quickly get down to where they do those updates in days and then it's going to be hours and then it will be minutes. So I think that's all going to happen very quickly.

3:55Joe Mazur: Okay, well, so tell us a little bit about Nightwing and what you guys do and how you specifically ended up in your role at Nightwing. Right. Yeah, so Nightwing's a cybersecurity company. We're about 2 ,000 people. We're based out of Sterling, Virginia. We're just over two and a half years old, but we have almost$2 billion in revenue. A lot of it is with the intelligence community and the Department of War. We have important products. We do cyber, so it's both offensive and defensive cyber. We do cyber resilience. An interesting capability is, you know, I talked about vulnerability assessments.

4:34We're really good at coming in and helping programs or companies with cyber vulnerability assessments. We can help protect the networks. We can do resilient command and control. And then we also have parts of the company that help with the last mile of cyber. We bought a company called Roka Security that is good with that. They can help with managed attribution and things like that. It's a neat company full of really cool people that like to support the Department of War and IC missions.

5:12Joe Mazur: So I did notice that you have an X-37B in your background sitting on your desk. So tell me a little bit about your background, because I feel like there's probably more to that story. My space journey started in 1993 when I had a top secret clearance. I was a captain in the Air Force, and I got a call from a gentleman out in Los Angeles. And he offered me the opportunity to go work at the Space Systems Center on a black program. but he couldn't tell me anything about it. I just had to go take the job and it changed my life. And effectively, I went and worked in space control systems. From there, I had an opportunity to come to Virginia and work at the National Reconstan's Office.

5:52I spent five years in SIGINT. And then another few years working as a space control PEM, program element monitor. So I was at the Pentagon helping between the program office and the Congress and the DOD and the joint staff. I had two main projects. One is now called GSAP, which is a geo-orbital system that does reconnaissance. Then the X-37 was one of the more interesting projects. I was very early in its development when it was still a black program. I'm not knowing right now it's on orbit. I think it's had eight missions so far and likely about to go up again. So it's everything about the fact that it now exists, but the missions, right, are still classified.

6:40And I think that's a neat part about it.

6:43Joe Mazur: So how would you describe how the cyber environment has evolved since you started your career? It's interesting because I said that I started back in like 1993. And in 1993, cyber wasn't a big thing, but the space and cyber were actually like our program office. We had both. And then it did break out, I think, in like 1997. But I don't know. I think that it all goes together. So, you know, space is an enabler for cyber. Most cyber effects, you know, they're going to go through the ground, the Internet or, you know, things like that or, you know, through a little something that you'll put into a system.

7:20But, you know, space is ubiquitous, right? It's all over the world. So, you know, if you want to throw a cyber effect and you want to do it on the other side of the world, you could use the Internet. But how do you do that in a closed area like China or North Korea or something like that, where, you know, maybe space is a route in and people don't look. Look, you know, they expect tasks, you know, across the surface, but maybe they're not expecting it or they're not defending against it from space.

7:46Joe Mazur: This might be a good time. I want to throw up a graphic here that shows sort of the different ways into a space system. And I'm curious, like, maybe you can walk me through it. If you were in an adversary, and, you know, there are some people who aren't going to are listening to this on audio, so they won't have the graphic necessarily in front of them. But so to the extent you can just kind of walk us through, like, you're an adversary. Like, where do you go in? Well, you have the director of the National Reconcepts Office, Chris Gullis. He recently retired. but right before he retired, and he was there for seven and a half years, and somebody asked him, what kept you up at night, right?

8:22When you were the director, what were you most worried about? And he said cyber, right? He's like, I was afraid that the NRO was going to get their mission to be taken down by a cyber attack. And he wasn't worried about a cyber attack against the spacecraft. He was worried about a cyber attack against his mission, right? And so they either go against his command control networks or get into his mission systems, right? And so, you know, I mean, he was doing as much as he could to protect against those. And certainly, at least, you know, he made it through his tour, right, without having a cyber attack against the NRO.

8:57Well, I'm sure that people are attacking our agencies, whether it's Department of War or the intelligence community, people are attacking it all the time. Nation state as well as, you know, other nefarious people for a lot of reasons. But they were able to defend against that. So anyway, I think that the biggest thing is you've got to have that resilient command and control. You've got to protect the ground. So there's just too many ways to get to it. Got it.

9:24Joe Mazur: Okay. So I want to talk real quick about Viasat. So there's a very famous example of a Viasat satellite near the start of the Russia-Ukraine war, which suffered a cyber attack. So just curious, like, what impact did that ultimately have in the industry? And has there been substantial change since then? And like, what remains an open issue in your mind? No, I think the biggest thing was that that was one of the first attacks against a commercial spacecraft and a commercial capability. And so everybody has said that if a commercial capability or commercial satellite is providing a military capability, then it's a target, right?

10:05And so that was the first time, you know, the Russians, they targeted that. And they go after SpaceX and Starlink and things like that all the time. But look at what happened, right? Biosets back up. Starlink is up, right? So I think it shows the resilience of the companies and how fast, right, that they can, when they're attacked, that they can respond to the attack and that they can, you know, even if somebody is able to get into their network, that they can kick them out and, you know, start over and get back up.

10:38Joe Mazur: So, going back to your comment on the ground, do you agree that whoever owns the ground station owns the satellite? And if so, why does the satellite, for the most part, get in the engineering budget? Oftentimes, the ground is an afterthought. Yeah, that's interesting. I'll go back into my career when I worked at the National Reconnaissance Office. I worked on a program where we were building a ground processing system. It was for LEO. At the same time, we were also building a new spacecraft for LEO. and the spacecraft was certainly getting a lot of the funding. But the answer is that the spacecraft has to get launched on a timeline.

11:22There's launch vehicles or it gets manifested. The ground, you can always keep fixing it. And so that's always the thought. Well, we'll fix the ground. The spacecraft, when it goes on orbit, they have to be able to command and control it. But a lot of the other missions, like the processing, they can push that off and fix it later if they don't get it right. So anyway, you can't launch the spacecraft with an engineer, you know, up there coding, right? So, right, right, right, right.

11:52Joe Mazur: Or with a wrench. And what about this Air Force jet that's in the middle of the graphic? Like, why is that there? Talk to me a little bit about that. Well, part of it is the interconnectedness between a battle network, right? So, you know, in the joint, they have a JADC2, the joint force. And then, you know, for the Air Force, it's ABMS. So, you know, space and cyber are an enabler, right, for the rest of the fight. In fact, if you think of a jet and you put an F-35 in there or say it's a, you know, F-22, those are cyber jets. They really are. I mean, their electronic warfare capabilities are exquisite.

12:31It's not just how fast they can fly and what missiles they carry, right? I mean, I think that the Secretary of the Air Force, he would want every airborne platform to effectively be a cyber platform. So, and they're going to communicate through space.

12:47Joe Mazur: Well, okay. So one theme I want to talk about is this idea that, you know, we all know the Space Force is betting on resiliency through proliferation, effectively, right? But every new satellite, every new cross-link, every new commercial partner is a new way into the system. So how do you think about the proliferated architecture from the perspective of the fact that we've just created multiple potential points of entry now? Is it more survivable or is it vulnerable in a completely different way? Well, so, I mean, the reason they go to a proliferated architecture is because they're concerned about kinetic attack, right?

13:29And so if you have one spacecraft up in orbit, you know, the adversary can take out one spacecraft. It's pretty, it's not hard. You know, there's a lot of methods to do that. But, you know, if you have a thousand or 5 ,000 star links, you know, I mean, it's impossible to take 5 ,000 star links out in a kinetic attack. I mean, even if they have a laser or something or just hitting them one after another, right, it's even that magazine, it has a lot of depth, but it would be hard. But when you look at the cyber attack, right, and again, the cyber attack could be in many different areas. It's not necessarily a cyber attack against the spacecraft, but it could be, right?

14:08But they could get into the ground station, they could get into the lakes. And, you know, the last thing they would need is to be able to get into a spacecraft where you're into basically the boot, right? And it can't be fixed, right? There's no way to fix it.

14:24Joe Mazur: So just taking a look at this kind of new proliferated architecture and thinking about the fact that so many new entrants are entering or working with the Space Force now, new commercial partners. You know, in some cases, let's just take, you know, it's a 40 person startup. They're flying a DoD payload. Who's actually checking the cyber architecture of that startup? Like who is saying like, okay, like this fits within what we need and, you know, the vulnerabilities are being checked in the right way. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I think there's actual, like, at least if it's Department of War, they have the program manager.

15:01He has requirements, right? So he's going to have to go through and make sure that, you know, that company's hitting some of the cyber, basic cyber hygiene requirements. But I'll also say that I think that if you have one spacecraft up, put up there by a 40-person company, that a nation-state actor probably isn't that interested in it. Right? And so they're not going to go and develop an exploit against one spacecraft. They're going to want to, what is the mission of that spacecraft? Is it important? If it's a research spacecraft, they're not interested in it.

15:39Joe Mazur: Now, assuming it was, like, assuming it was, like, like, conceptually, like, what is the process to be able to say, okay, like, we're gonna, who's, who's doing the actual analysis or checking up that? One thing I'm going to say is that if you can start early, right? In other words, if you have a spacecraft that's been on orbit for 10 years, it's too late, right? It may not be too late, but generally, you know, you've got size, weight, and power constraints. And, you know, does it have a software-defined radio? Can you even have an upload where you can put, you know, something on there? And, you know, you're not – you're going to have to have something with low swap, right?

16:15It's not going to impact the spacecraft. Nobody wants anything that's going to create a problem with timing with their spacecraft or getting data down from it or anything like that. It has to be, you know, no impact. But if you work and start at the very beginning, right, then you can get code. You can develop your code and it can be resilient code. And, you know, there's products out there, including some that Nightwing has, that easily can get onto the software stack and would be effective.

16:48Joe Mazur: So I want to go back to this point. So if there was a satellite that was launched 10 years ago, are you sort of saying that for the most part that you can't really patch that satellite once it's in orbit? given? What are your thoughts on that? There are a number of assets up there that have been launched 10 years ago that are obviously quite important. Yeah, sure. First off, remember what we talked about from the beginning is that your biggest vulnerability is probably on the ground. Why don't we just go and not worry as much about the spacecraft on orbit and let's just spend some money and get your ground resilience.

17:28Make sure your command and control links are resilient. And then, you know, let's take a look at the spacecraft and let's look at the code and let's look at whether there's a capability to, you know, upload any software. It would have to be software probably, right? It would go up there. Yeah. Again, with no impact, right? Nobody's going to accept an impact if it's going to, you know, delay their timing or delay, you know, getting their mission. So, okay.

17:56Joe Mazur: Well, so a solid point. Now let's, maybe let's look at sort of a new program now, Golden Dome, right? Tying together sensors, relays, interceptors, together in software, right? And on a highly, highly compressed timeline. Do you think that cyber is being designed into this system in the right way? Or do you feel like it's more like something that's going to be bolted up? Yeah, so General Guttline, who, by the way, was a space control pen, like right after me. So he and I worked together on their stuff. But General Guttlein, that's like the first thing he started. He started a cyber consortium for Golden Dome.

18:36He has more than a handful of companies that are already in that. And he's talking, you know, unclassified. He's saying that they've had success. They've been working for over a year now, and they've done some testing. And he's saying that the C2 is command control network, which is critical. It's the glue of that whole Golden Dome. He says the C2 network works.

18:57Joe Mazur: I wanted to talk about this concept of how cyber is a warfighting domain. The department has said that it has treated cyber as basically a back office IT function for far too long. Do you think that's a fair assessment? It might be fair, but I like that idea that they're considering it as a warfighting domain. Because my experience says that warfighters have requirements. Requirements equal funding, right? And so the biggest thing is whether there's an imperative to go and fund cyber defense, right? And we're starting to see new executive orders coming out of the president that then drop down to the Department of War, that then get to the services.

19:41and they're taking it serious now. I mean, there's no excuse, right? They understand that there's vulnerabilities and they're focusing on their critical weapon systems first. And so, you know, they're doing the analysis and they'll implement the fixes and they have funding for it. So I think that it's important, yeah.

20:04Joe Mazur: And is that what you think changes when you call something a warfighting domain? There's just much... It leads to requirements and it leads to funding, right? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So, okay. So I want to talk a little bit about talent. So Secretary of War Pegseth just announced that there was going to be a huge overhaul in Cyber Command and it's one of the biggest overhauls in over 16 years.

20:34Joe Mazur: Who defends ultimately a Space Force satellite today? Is it Guardians? Is it Cybercom? Is it contractors who built the satellite? No, that's the Guardian's responsibility. And so the thing about it is when they take it more seriously, if you follow Space Systems Center, they have a group that's OTTI, Operational Test and Training Infrastructure, right? And so they're starting to build out the, it's almost like a Top Gun for space, right? And it's, you know, they build out virtual ranges and they'll start these, you know, practicing the fighting, right? You know, the war fighting that they have to do in space and maneuvering and how they would react to jamming, you know, both brute force jamming and smart jamming.

21:21So, yeah, so it's encouraging to see that OTTI and the infrastructure getting built out.

21:28Joe Mazur: Do you think the U.S. needs a separate cyber force? Yeah. So, you know, I don't have an answer, right? I don't know if the answer is yes or no, but what I'm going to say is that if you were to go back, what is it, five or seven years now, where we had started the separate space force, a lot of people didn't think that it would work. And I think that a separate space force has actually worked out pretty well. I mean, they're funding, right? They're nearly doubling their funding in the FY27 budget. So they're expanding the number of guardians that they have, right, since they started. So, you know, if they were to break out cyber as a separate force, I'm sure that, you know, we would see the same focus on it.

22:13Joe Mazur: So in this kind of overhaul of Cybercom, you know, the ideal outcome, right, is you have operators who stay for effectively their whole career, right, rather than rotating out. How does the military keep that type of talent versus effectively ending up in companies like Nightwing? Oh, no. Yeah, so first off, I don't think that Nightwing, if we're a competitor to the military, right? I mean, I know that there's a limited number of people who are in cyber, but people who are in the military, right? And I was there for 20 years. I retired as a lieutenant colonel. And the one thing is, you really enjoy the mission, right?

23:00You enjoy the mission and being in charge and having the ability to work on these large programs and to do things. In my career, I had the chance to work on the X-37 and other programs like that. One of the things, and then I retired, right? I retired. I worked at DARPA as a civilian. So, you can work as a defense civilian, too. And anyway, but then you go to Nightwing and there's advantages there too, right? So the thing about industry is that, again, maybe we can get somebody on a program longer, but we're also competing, right? Just because we have a contract one day doesn't mean that we'll have it four or five years from now, right?

23:43Because we're constantly competing to win and keep our business. But the bottom line is I think everybody's just mission focused, right? as long as people, whether they're working for the military or they're working for Nightwing, to understand that we enjoy defending our country and defending the assets and that aspect of the book.

24:03Joe Mazur: Well, you bring up an interesting dynamic. I'm kind of curious, Joe, and I don't know how much visibility you have in this at the company level, but I'm curious, how do you think about talent acquisition as a business? Like, where are the best operators? Is it folks that are coming out of uniform? Or is there other places where, you know, that truly understand the problem and what needs to be done? Yeah, that's interesting. Our director of recruiting, her office across her mind. So I hope she won't agree with that. But here's what I'm going to say. We have an office down in Melbourne, Florida, right?

24:43And if you were to go to that office, and that's where a lot of our cyber developers work, right? it is very clear that a lot of those guys have never been in the military, right? In fact, if I go down and I visit that office and I'm, see, I'm kind of casual today, right? But I'm wearing slacks. If I were to go down there and show up in my slacks, they know I'm from the headquarters because they're all wearing shorts, right? And a t-shirt. And so, you know, I don't know. I think that a lot of people come out of college and they just want to work in cyber, right? They want to do AI or artificial intelligence.

25:20They want to be in that business. And Nightwing certainly has a need for those people. And if you're in the military and you've gotten six, eight years or ten years and you don't want to make the military a career, then maybe we would be good for that too. The thing about the people in the military is they'll come to us and they already have both theirs.

25:41Joe Mazur: right so so okay so i i want to talk about um so so our national defense strategy wants exquisite capabilities and frontier ai from the industry um cyber for the most part is still mostly brought bought as labor hours on contracts and oftentimes that outlasts the actual capability so i'm curious like from your perspective how long does it take to actually buy cyber capability? And how long is it actually useful? Well, first off, there's two types of cyber, right? So I think that if you're doing cyber resilience, defensive cyber, then you're probably going to buy that. You could buy it as a product, but normally it could be ours because they have operation centers, right?

26:28So you're going to be manning operation centers, and that's 24 by 7 and things like that, which are better for labor hours. Oh, I should say, when I was in the military, my role, I was a contracting officer and a program manager. So in my DARPA time, I was director of contracting. So I'm pretty familiar with the idea of labor hours versus... But what I think you want to do, and this is the DARPA model, is they put out BAAs, broad agency announcements, and now Air Force Research Lab, they put out advanced research announcements. And we just won an award on one called Genesis. And it's to do offensive and defensive cyber research, right?

27:12And, you know, in that case, you have to provide a product, right? The delivery, because another transaction is a product. And I think that in a lot of cases, they're going to go towards, you know, where you have to develop and deliver products. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

27:30Joe Mazur: Yeah. Well, so let's talk about probably one of the most talked about topics within cyber, which is like, you know, how frontier labs are getting involved, especially finding vulnerabilities. I mean, the obvious big example of that is Claude and Mythos within hours finding vulnerabilities in various government systems. I'm kind of curious, how are you thinking about that and what that means in general for the future of how we handle cyber threats? And how does AI and the frontier labs weigh in on sort of the Nightwing strategy? Well, so I think that these Egenic AI tools, right, they're really effective and they're fast.

28:17And so I think that what's going to happen is we're going to need to effectively use Eugenic AI in our own tools that we build and use, right? And we're just going to have to get faster and faster and faster. And eventually, it almost becomes machine-on-machine warfare, cyber warfare. And I've heard people say, well, normally, you have an attack, they find a patch, you install, you test it. You test the patch and then you install it, right? There's no time for that. I think that you're just going to have to be pushing the patches out. But at the same time, you'll be able to, if there's an issue with the patch, you're just reversing, right?

28:58But you can't be looking at the patch and admiring it while your network is under attack, right? And the biggest problem is if somebody gets into your network, then they start to move through it laterally, right? And you got to shut that down. And, you know, again, it's not something that can happen over days or a week anymore. It's got to happen within hours or even minutes. I was at a conference and one of the DISA commander, right, is an Army Lieutenant General. What I took away from it was that, you know, maybe 10 years ago, if you were attacked, the first thing to do is to, you know, unplug your computer.

29:35Like, you know, take, unplug. You know, you got to take the system down. That can't happen anymore. I mean, you can't take down a warfight in the system, right? So basically, he says, listen, the mindset is we're going to fight through it, right? You've got to fight through the attack. You've got to be resilient and fight through it, keep the network up.

29:55Joe Mazur: Maybe this is more of a controversial question, but do you think a frontier AI lab should be a defense cyber contractor? and I am curious what is Nightwing's perspective on whether partnering one versus competing with one? Yeah, I think we would partner with them, right? And one of the biggest problems is when you're working in the Department of Defense or you're working in the intelligence community is that you've got to have a sandbox that's safe to play in, right? And so you can't go and use some of these egenic AI capabilities and tools on a mission network, right? So they've got to be able to find some area where you can play and do research and team together.

30:46Joe Mazur: Now, Nightwing was previously part of Raytheon, and now under Blackstone, which is a private equity firm, in this new Nightwing, what is possible, I'm curious, that maybe wasn't possible inside of Prime? Has it evolved the culture of the company? Well, the culture of the company, I think, has significantly changed from Raytheon's culture. I didn't work at Raytheon, right? But like I said, I was a government contracting officer. So I had a lot of contracts with Raytheon. And I would say that, first off, our CEO's name is Bob Coleman. And he's an entrepreneur, right? He gets it. He really understands cyber.

31:31And he loves the idea that we're going to do cyber in space. And that probably was the one thing that Raytheon Cyber Unit, Business Unit, couldn't do because Raytheon had a Space and Intelligence Business Unit, right? And so they did all of the space stuff. They had the contracts with the SSC and the NRO and other agencies like that. And so now, as Nightwing, we're able to go and compete in those areas. Got it.

32:01Joe Mazur: All right. Well, all right. Let's have a little bit of fun. Okay, I'm going to point, let's talk about a couple hypothetical scenarios. We've been having fun. That's true. That's true. That's true. But more fun is what I'll say. So it's 2030 or some type of future date, right? And I want to talk about what a kind of space fight effectively looks like, right? Which is like, my guess would be in a real space conflict, the first shot is going to be a cyber related shot versus a kinetic attack. um in that kind of fight play out what does that first day week month look like like you know an adversary decides to put on you know a substantial attack against a set of space assets and how like i i shouldn't say maybe how likely is that but where do you think something like a space Pearl Harbor fits into the probabilities over the next like five, 10 years?

33:03So when I was a program element monitor, I was responsible for space control. And I worked for a colonel and he would be going up and down the air staff, the DOD, the joint staff. And he talked about a space Pearl Harbor. And this is in 2005. And so now it's 21 years later and we haven't had of space for harbor, but I think that the chance of that is increasing. So, you know, there's two parts to that. One is, you know, there could be a kinetic attack, right, which, like you said, I don't think is going to be the first fight, and then there's the cyber attack. And an adversary is going to have two things that they're going to want to do.

33:39One, they're going to want to take out our kill chain, right? And so they're going to go after our military capabilities, and it's going to be both, you trying to jam and do smart attacks against our spacecraft, our ground system, our command and control networks, right? And for, you know, like most attacks that happen, if you're living in the United States, that may not have an impact on you, right? I mean, General Hyten, I remember watching or being in a conference with him and he talked about, you know, well, if there's an attack in space, how are we going to react? And he was the space command commander and he didn't actually know.

34:18We don't know yet until it happens, right? But they will respond to the attack and begin to defend and do what they can to keep our networks and kill chain up. But I think that the biggest thing is if they go after things that people will notice. In other words, like if they go after GPS, or they go after the banking system, or they go after our water treatment system, or they go after our electrical system or our gas system, you know, anything like that. And, you know, if you're a US citizen, I think it's going to be a bad day, right? Because people just aren't used to not being able to bank.

35:01I mean, you can check your, you go on your cell phone and you can check your account instantaneously. And all of a sudden, you don't even know, you know, how much money you have, right? You can't fill your car up because the pump won't work because it's GPS enabled. But the good thing is, is I think that the effects, because, you know, most of these networks are pretty resilient. They may take it down. But like you said earlier about the Intel SAT issue, right? over a day or two or maybe a week, they will get those networks back up. You know, the electrical system will come back up. The pumps will come back up.

35:38The GPS system, they will, you know, get that to work again, right? Because the systems are resilient. But I do think that U.S. citizens, if there's a Space Pearl Harbor, those first few days, first hours, it's going to be pretty disconcerting. Right.

35:56Joe Mazur: So, and where do you, do you think that this is being taken with the right amount of seriousness today? I think it is, but until we experience it, we don't know, right? So, yeah, I mean, I understand that like Ukraine and Russia, they fight cyber attacks all the time. And, you know, they probably would have more experience. And again, look at that, right? You know, the Ukrainians, they, you know, they don't, they may be without GPS for a day or two, or they might not have access to a banking or something, but they, you know, they get it back. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, I mean, is there anything that you've, in your conversations, have noticed in Washington that is still sort of the incorrect perspective on cyber and space?

36:45Where you hear it, you know, you're like, this is a common perspective that you think might be wrong. No, I think that the administration is taking it seriously and they're putting out the right directives and the right, yeah, the executive orders down to the military departments and, you know, getting that down to the operators. You know, again, I think they're taking it seriously. And, you know, what we want to see is the money start to flow into it. And unfortunately, you know, here we are, it's October 13th. We're in a continuing resolution, right? I mean, it's going to go through December 11th.

37:25I mean, that's not the way that you want the department or the intelligence community to run, right? So it would be better if they were able to get through the budgeting and get the programs, the funding they need, and so contracts get let and they can do what they need to do.

37:42Joe Mazur: So you've spent three decades across Air Force. You mentioned DARPA, X37. Is there a program that you wish you could talk more about? I know it's a strange question because I'm asking you to talk about something that you can't talk about. When I was in the intelligence community, I had a chance to work on, and it was around 9-11. So it was a multi-billion dollar project, and it was to take on, within the intelligence community, the director's hardest problems. and it was probably one of the funnest projects I worked on because it was White House driven, you know, very small program team, very little time.

38:25And it's everything that you want where, you know, we had all of the authorities that we need to go and just, you know, do the job. And, you know, laser focused on it. It was really, really neat.

38:37Joe Mazur: Looking out sort of into the future, next subsequent years, like, What part of Nightwing's product and portfolio set or what's coming down the pipeline are you most excited about or do you think is going to be the company's biggest advantage? Yeah, I think for Nightwing, one of the biggest things is everything starts with these vulnerability assessments. So the first thing you have to understand is where the problems are. And again, we'll likely bring egenic AI into the vulnerability assessments. But one thing that's different is, you know, we're just not going to have a tool that's going to go run out and, you know, find the vulnerabilities, but it'll be directed by people who have decades of experience, right?

39:21Nation-state experience and, you know, understanding where the vulnerabilities are. So you use the eugenic AI as a tool, but with smart people running it, if that makes any sense. And so I think that, yeah, once you find the vulnerabilities, then the next thing is, is what do you do about them, right? And, you know, I keep using the term poem, right? But you can't just write up some, you know, things saying, hey, we're going to fix that in the future, right? Then the next part is just how do you fix it?

39:48Joe Mazur: Joe, what do you do for fun? What do I do for fun? Yeah, I have kids and I have two daughters that are 14 and 16. And I, the thing is my wife and I, we've gone through a four-year journey of building a house. And they say that a couple will only build a house one time. And I can agree with that. so sorry are you are you are you building are you yourself building the house or no no it's a vacation house and we yeah we had to buy the land and get a um yeah you had architect and you had to have it built and yeah it's just uh right it's done well oh it's done okay well congratulations It's done. Yeah, it's done.

40:30Joe Mazur: Congratulations. That was fun. Okay, well then tell me one thing that maybe most people don't know about you. So when I worked at the National Reconnaissance Office, I had an additional duty. And I worked at the White House as a military social aid. And I did that for two presidents, President Clinton and President Bush, which is it was over 9-11, which is interesting. But anyway, as a social aid, you know, you get to meet a lot of different people who either go to the White House or in this case, the White House went to New York. And there was a 50th anniversary of the United Nations. And I had a chance to escort Vladimir Putin.

41:14And so I've been like one foot away from Vladimir Putin. And I also got to escort the Yasser Arafat, right, from the Palestinians, right? and the premiere from China and Israel. I had the hard target, the people who were, I don't know, just a little more special handling.

41:41Joe Mazur: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, Joe, you've had quite the career, so I certainly appreciate you sitting down with me and talking through all this. I enjoy it, yeah. And hopefully, this thing, the orbital warfare, and space control. It's all very interesting. I don't know if you caught it, but Troy Meek, the Secretary of the Air Force a couple weeks ago, said that the U.S. has a space control system on orbit. And being a space control PEM, I'm not surprised about that. But a lot of people, I watch nightly news, and they go and say, well, we're doing orbital warfare, right? He didn't say that. Yeah. But anyway, it's interesting.

42:22And it opens up, I think, for the United States, more opportunities to get out there. And, you know, our adversaries, they already know what we have. So, yeah.

42:32Joe Mazur: Well, it'll definitely be an interesting few years, especially as we see more vulnerabilities being exposed by new AI capabilities. So I think it'll be definitely a really interesting time over the next few years. Joe, thanks so much for being with us. Real pleasure to have you. And thanks for all the cyber insights. No, yeah, this was fun. Thank you. Until next time.