Last week, we debuted To Catch a Thief: China’s Rise to Cyber Supremacy (TCAT) hosted by our newly appointed Chief Cyber Raconteur Nicole Perlroth. Now a Top 5 Apple Documentary podcast and an Amazon Featured Podcast, TCAT is a first-of-its-kind podcast docuseries that explores China’s perceived evolution from “the most polite, mediocre hackers in cyberspace” to the “apex predator” that now haunts America’s critical infrastructure.
Why did we partner with Nicole?
In Nicole, we saw a unique and rare ability to transform these esoteric cybersecurity and national security topics into something that is accessible and easily understood by us all. She spent a decade as the lead cybersecurity reporter at The New York Times and wrote the NYT bestseller This is How They Tell Me the World Ends. This was an expert mind that could help us connect the dots, especially as China has unfolded its cyber operations for the last two decades.
Episode 9 at NYSE
TCAT is a 9-episode podcast, with the final episode recorded live at the New York Stock Exchange. We invited CIOs, CISOs, and seasoned technology leaders from America’s most vibrant corporations. These are the folks dealing with this directly on the front line.
Our mission that evening was to help the community to gain awareness and understand the magnitude of the challenges that we face, not only at the nation level, but at an individual level. More importantly, we see this as a forum in which we could solution the path forward.
Why now?
Arguably, the topics discussed in the podcast are not new. These events have been covered in the news and in many cases by Nicole while she was at The New York Times. Our goal is to paint the bigger picture of what happened then, in addition to what was covered by the media, and at different levels of business and government, and to connect the dots for the American public.
We want to look back to these breaches or major companies, who lost all of their IP to understand how these events have changed the courses of certain industries (decimated for some) and the ultimate impacts at an individual level. Chinese hackers have raided solar companies, turbines, genetically modified seeds, electric vehicles, and even batteries. And now, some of the world's top manufacturers - from makers of turbines, solar, drones, and even home routers sold on Amazon – are backed by China, with IP gained from hackers.
In episode 9, Nicole was joined by the experts who have been targeted by, or instrumental in tracking Chinese cyberespionage. People who have directly engaged the People’s Republic of China on this threat, both diplomatically, and in the cyber domain. And the people who are leading the charge on building resilience to this threat.
Jen Easterly, who until very recently, served as Director for the nation’s cyber defense agency, CISA, and led that agency through a period of relentless Chinese cyber activity. She previously was the head of security at global cybersecurity at Morgan Stanley, and had a storied career at NSA.
Rob Joyce, a director of cybersecurity who spent 34 years at the National Security Agency, and served in various leadership roles, including leading the storied Tailored Access Operations unit division, or TAO, which conducts hacking on behalf of US foreign intelligence gathering missions. He knows, perhaps more than anyone, how China’s cyber capabilities stack up, how their targeting has shifted, and how we are responding.
Jim Lewis, who was the SVP at the Center for Strategic & International Studies in Washington, a fancy title that belies the fact that Jim, perhaps more than anyone, has been involved in backchannel negotiations with the Chinese on cyber espionage and more recently American infrastructure.
David Barboza, Nicole’s former colleague at The New York Times, who spent 15 years in China, as Shanghai bureau chief, and did such an incredible job covering the Chinese Communist Party that not only was he awarded the Pulitzer twice, but was the reason China hacked the NYT.
Bipul Sinha, our own CEO and co-founder of Rubrik – who leads the charge to deliver cyber resilience for organizations across the world.
Our event at NYSE was just the beginning. From podcasts to our Rubrik Zero Labs research, Nicole will help Rubrik to lead important conversations about the future of cybersecurity, cyber resilience, and the technologies that power and protect the world.
As Bipul said, “We share an urgency and commitment to document when, why, and how cyber attacks happen, and how our industry must work together to be digitally resilient to them.”
Listen and subscribe – here we go!
