CyberWire Daily - Bernard Brantley: Tomorrow is a new day. [CISO] [Career Notes]

Episode Date: December 3, 2023

Bernard Brantley, CISO from Corelight sits down to share his inspiring career path with others. Bernard started at the very bottom of the tech stack, and shares how he was extremely unclear about what it was that he wanted to do in life and how he was going to get there. Ultimately he reached a point now where he has the self confidence and an incredible level of success that allows him to be authentic and proudly share his story. Bernard overcame dropping out of the military academy and was trying to figure out how he could take these big dreams and aspirations he had as a child and turn them into something fruitful as an adult. Working his way up from the bottom he is now sharing how he overcomes those days of adversity, saying "I spend minimum time trying to like spin my wheels or, kind of stay in frustration or a down period and, and really, uh, try as quickly as possible to move from, "hey, this was a tough day" to, to, into, "all right, uh, this was a tough day because maybe I didn't commit enough time in this area, or maybe I could have had a bit better conversation with this person." We thank Bernard for sharing his story with us. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to the Cyber Wire Network, powered by N2K. and VPNs, yet breaches continue to rise by an 18% year-over-year increase in ransomware attacks and a $75 million record payout in 2024. These traditional security tools expand your attack surface with public-facing IPs that are exploited by bad actors more easily than ever with AI tools. It's time to rethink your security. Thank you. Learn more at zscaler.com slash security. Hi, my name's Bernard Brantley. I'm CISO at Corelight. Interestingly enough, as a kid growing up, I wanted to be a fighter pilot. So I saw Iron Eagle when I was probably six or seven years old and thought it was the absolute coolest thing that I could do. What I later learned was that I had astigmatism, which was limiting for me to become a military aviator. And that changed the kind of

dynamic and situation in my life to where it's say, hey, I now have no idea what I want to be when I grow up. In high school, I was really attracted to math, social studies, because I was really interested in the world around me. Coming from the city of Detroit, I hadn't traveled a whole bunch, so learning what else was out there was very interesting. And when I got to college, I kind of tracked that same path. I studied economics. I also studied civil engineering. It was kind of interesting to say that had I have completed West Point, I would have been a economics major with a civil engineering minor, which probably are not two more disparate things to go after from an education perspective. But those are the types of things that held my interest.

Those are the types of things that held my interest. College was an interesting time. Coming up through school, I wanted to be an aviator, and that is all that I wanted to be. When it came to make my decision for college and I learned that I could not be an aviator, for context, I had been accepted to the United States Air Force Academy, United States Naval Academy, as well as the United States Military Academy, thinking that the Naval and Air Force would have been my choices so that I could go be an aviator. It kind of became a, oh no, I have no idea what I'm going to do. And so I selected West Point. So I went into college without a full understanding of what going to the military academy meant or what that would look like. And to be quite frank, I absolutely hated the experience, which is a large contributor to why I did not finish there. Since then, I have yet to complete college.

I've got some things in the works now to see that through and then kind of move on to a more advanced degree. But all in all, my college experience, while rewarding and fruitful, was not great for me from a kind of personal aspect. you know looking back if i had understood the path that i wanted to take through life maybe had some more clear understanding of what opportunities i had via the military whether that be in signal service or in infantry or in aviation that was not flying jets, I probably would have looked at things differently. But given that I'm not doing what I wanted to do, I had no path to doing what I wanted to do, I believe that that would have been common regardless of whether I had gone to the military academy

or a regular college, given that I had no idea what I was going to do after I got done. So I didn't see the point in continuing. My last job before I got into tech was an assistant manager at Lady Foot Locker. And you're saying, how the heck did he go from United States Military Academy to Lady Foot Locker? And the answer is, again, no real clear guidance on where it was I wanted to go or what I wanted to be. The Lady Foot Locker experience was not one that I'd recommend to anyone. For me, that just was not it. And I figured I needed to go do something different.

At that time, I did not have access to a Wi-Fi network. I heard that they were able to be audited, and I wanted to learn how to do that. So I logged into a computer. I started searching the web. I found the Backtrack operating system. I tried to figure out how to install that on a laptop. It took me six or seven tries. And then I went about learning some of the wireless auditing tools such as AircrackNG

and ArrowDumpNG. And I got really involved in what Linux and the Linux operating system meant, not only for my immediate tasks, but it was like, hey, this is cool. I'm able to kind of go and learn and poke at things and figure stuff out. And if I don't know it, I have man pages to help me. And there really are no mistakes because it's just a continuous learning experience. Luckily, I was able to take that with a couple of classes at a community college. And I was going through Craigslist and saw an ad for a data center support technician. And I had no idea what that meant, but it said needs Linux experience. And I sent him my resume and I got a call and there's where I started.

Nighttime support at a data center. So I always had this belief that when I got my first data center job and I knew what kind of salaries folks could command in tech, I took a picture of a sailboat and I pasted that up on my background. I said, I'm going to figure out a route to get that boat. And in each of the positions that I held, I looked up to the next level or maybe the level above that and said, I'm sure that person is at an earning level and at a technical level much greater than I am now, but I think I can get there. Let me go learn everything that that person knows so that if ever asked a question, I can show that I'm the person that they want to bring into their organization or bring into their team and

ultimately that I could be in that succession plan. And so moving from the kind of lower, lower on the rung, nighttime tech support up and through systems administration and into network security analyst, it was always that, let me see what's there above me, which ultimately resulted in me getting aligned with directors and principals at both the Microsoft and Amazon scales, which gave me the robust set of skills required for Corelight to come say, hey, we're looking for a CISO. Would you like to interview? I'd like to think I'm pretty good at handling adversity. I've been through quite a bit in my life in multiple different periods for multiple different reasons, some self-inflicted, others not. I've come to the point of overall acknowledgement. It doesn't matter what it is,

what does it take for me to get to the point of acknowledging that I own this problem? And once that acknowledgement happens, what are we going to go do to solve it? So I spend minimum time trying to like spin my wheels or kind of stay in frustration or a down period and really try as quickly as possible to move from, hey, this was a tough day to into, all right, this was a tough day because maybe I didn't commit enough time in this area, or maybe I could have had a better conversation with this person. So what am I going to do to solve it and get right back into these are my objectives and goals for the next day or the next period to ensure that I correct whatever reasoning there was for me having that type of day and ensure that not only do I not

experience it again, but my teams or the folks that are involved in that are better prepped to handle it in the future and ultimately remove that as, you know, one of those things that happens within the organization. And now, a message from Black Cloak. a message from Black Cloak. Did you know the easiest way for cyber criminals to bypass your company's defenses is by targeting your executives

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