CyberWire Daily - Charlie Moore: Pilot to head honcho in cyber. [Cyber Command] [Career Notes[

Episode Date: January 29, 2023

Our guest, Charlie Moore, is a recently retired USAF Lieutenant General who sits down to share his story from flying high in the air to becoming a bigwig in the cyber community. He was most recently the Deputy Commander of the United States Cyber Command, and also spent part of his career as a human factors engineer working on human interfaces for fighter aircraft. When he first began his Air Force career, he was a member of the last class entering into the Academy that was not issued desktop computers. Charlie discusses how this changed as the year went on and how that impacted his career both in and out of the military. Charlie worked for different companies over the years to further his career and his goals, and discusses how his flying career has helped him and says, "I was extremely passionate about the flying aspect of my career for 25 years and I became even more passionate about operating in this space." We thank Charlie 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. Hello, my name is Lieutenant General Charlie Tuna Moore, retired. I was recently the Deputy Commander, United States Cyber Command. My father was a career Army officer, and he was also a helicopter pilot. And so serving the nation was always something that was very, very important to my family and became very, very important to me.

I was also fascinated by the fact that my father was a pilot and thought, well, if I can serve the nation and also be a pilot, I would love to figure out how to do that. The big difference was helicopters weren't quite as maneuverable or quite as fast as I wanted to go. So I really wanted to fly jets. And so the natural inclination then was to look to how I might be able to do that. And that led me to the United States Air Force Academy. Coming from a military family, I didn't go to the academy with any illusions about what the environment was going to be like. And surprisingly, there are a lot of people that do show up there and aren't quite sure what to expect. So I fully knew what to expect and

what I was getting into. And I found it challenging. The more and more time that I spent there and that I studied and I learned about the profession of arms and being an officer and also being a pilot, the more I was convinced I was on the right path. So when you're a freshman at the academy, at least the time when I was there, you're given the opportunity to solo on a glider. And that's the program that I became involved in as an instructor. And I found that not only did I really enjoy flying, but I really enjoyed instructing as well. And I always knew that if I was going to go down this path, I wanted to fly jets. I wanted to fly fighters.

And of course, there's no guarantee of that. It's based on your performance at pilot training. And so that was the path and the goal that I'd set for myself. During that process, I earned a F-16, which made me very happy, and then went off to F-16 school. And then that kind of began my flying career inside the Air Force. This is a profession you can never solve.

There are too many things that are always changing. There's updates to your aircraft. There's updates to your weapons that you're going to employ off the aircraft. There's changes from your adversaries, changes their craft and their weapons, their tactics, techniques, and procedures are changing. Yours are advancing. All these things come together to make for a very challenging environment, a very rewarding environment, and one that I have no doubt that was what I was put on the earth to do. And then to have a branch in my career at about that 25-year point

where I really started entering and into the cyberspace, the domain, and realizing the importance of this domain, not just in terms of the defense of our nation, but the criticality that it played in terms of our ability to execute

our traditional military capabilities in order to do that mission. First off, I didn't own a computer until I was 25 years old. And in fact, when I look back at my time at the Air Force Academy, I was the class of 1989. We were the last class to enter the Air Force Academy that was not issued at that time desktop computers. So when I think about that as my beginnings and then 25 years later, I'm asked to be the first director of operations at the combatant command known as U.S. Cyber Command and to be responsible for all the day-to-day offense and defensive operations. It's a bit mind-blowing to me. But the first way that I was introduced to it was I had left the 57th Wing at Nellis and went on a year-long deployment to Iraq. I returned late 2014, very early 2015, to work for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs on the Joint Staff in the Pentagon as the Deputy Director for Global Operations. And so I spent a little more than two years working a lot on the internal processes that we were going to have to execute to perform

operations in cyberspace alongside and synchronize and integrated with those traditional military capabilities. And so that's where I first really got deep into the space. At the end of that assignment, a little over two years, I was actually scheduled to return back to the Air Force. In fact, I had an assignment in hand. And I got a phone call one day that said, the director of the National Security Agency, Admiral Rogers, would like to talk to you. And so I called him and he asked me if I would be willing to come up to be his director of operations and that we expected we would probably within the next year elevate this organization to become, at that time, the 10th Combatant Command in the United States Department

of Defense. It would be known as U.S. Cyber Command. And I'll tell you, when he first asked me, I thought that he had actually was talking to the wrong guy, that maybe he had confused me with somebody else. But his vision, which I believe was very right at the time, was that we really needed to operationalize this domain. So that's how I ended up at U.S. Cyber Command as a director of operations. I did that position for about three years.

Once again, was preparing to leave, go back to the Air Force for a job and was already hired into another job as a three-star. And at that time, the director of the National Security Agency and the commander of U.S. Cyber Command, General Nakasone, asked if I would stay and be the deputy, which I then did for two years. Find something that you're passionate about. And if you're passionate about it, you're going to enjoy everything that you're doing. You'll be able to get through the downtimes and the uptimes and the challenges because they're going to come. And I was very lucky because I was extremely passionate about the flying aspect of my career for 25 years.

And I became even more passionate about operating in this space because I realized the importance of it to national security. And those traditional domains and those traditional warfighting capabilities can't succeed if we don't succeed in the cyber domain. And if you find that passion for something, then you're going to enjoy what you do and it'll be extremely rewarding and you can ride out the highs and you can ride out the lows. Serving something bigger than yourself is very important to a lot of people. And I thank God for that because it's those people that are going to defend our great nation and our way of life. There's nobody working at U.S. Cyber Command at any level who couldn't be making a significant amount, more amount of money in the private sector.

But they're doing what they do because they believe in serving their country. And those type of people are absolutely amazing to work with every single day. And if I was going to boil down why I remained in the military for 33 years, it was those types of people. And now, a message from Black Cloak. Did you know the easiest way for cybercriminals to bypass your company's defenses

is by targeting your executives and their families at home. Black Cloak's award-winning digital executive protection platform secures their personal devices, home networks, and connected lives. Because when executives are compromised at home, your company is at risk. In fact, over one-third of new members discover they've already been breached. Protect your executives and their families 24-7, 365, with Black Cloak. Learn more at blackcloak.io.