This conversation examines defense technology and artificial intelligence-driven cybersecurity, focusing on multi-domain threats, autonomy and investment trends. Dave DeWalt of NightDragon participates on theCUBE and NYSE Wired: Defense Tech. DeWalt is an investor and former chief executive officer in cybersecurity; they explain how artificial intelligence, agentic autonomy and geopolitical pressure reshape defense technology and procurement.
DeWalt explains that an accelerating offense versus defense dynamic is driven by AI. They note that attacker capabilities generate exploits at machine speed, forcing defenders to adopt autonomous integrated security across domains such as space, air, maritime and ground. DeWalt highlights the need for stronger guardrails and closer public private collaboration to manage risk while enabling innovation.
DeWalt outlines NightDragon's investment focus on post-quantum cryptography, resilient edge computing, autonomy and multi-domain situational awareness to secure critical infrastructure and enable resilient operations. They emphasize convergence among cybersecurity, AI infrastructure and multi-domain operations as a central factor for defense technology strategy and investment.
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Dave DeWalt, NightDragon
This conversation examines defense technology and artificial intelligence-driven cybersecurity, focusing on multi-domain threats, autonomy and investment trends. Dave DeWalt of NightDragon participates on theCUBE and NYSE Wired: Defense Tech. DeWalt is an investor and former chief executive officer in cybersecurity; they explain how artificial intelligence, agentic autonomy and geopolitical pressure reshape defense technology and procurement.
DeWalt explains that an accelerating offense versus defense dynamic is driven by AI. They note that attacker capabilities generate exploits at machine speed, forcing defenders to adopt autonomous integrated security across domains such as space, air, maritime and ground. DeWalt highlights the need for stronger guardrails and closer public private collaboration to manage risk while enabling innovation.
DeWalt outlines NightDragon's investment focus on post-quantum cryptography, resilient edge computing, autonomy and multi-domain situational awareness to secure critical infrastructure and enable resilient operations. They emphasize convergence among cybersecurity, AI infrastructure and multi-domain operations as a central factor for defense technology strategy and investment.
>> John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We are here at theCUBE's NYSE studio. Of course, we have our Palo Alto studio connecting Silicon Valley to Wall Street. This is our new Defense Tech series. We talk to the leaders who are exploring all the new business models, technology innovation. And of course, the tide has shifted with AI as the battlefield and decisions are being made on the warfare front. Everything's changed. Dave DeWalt is here. He's the CEO and founder of NightDragon, investor, former entrepreneur, CEO, now driving and innovating. Dave, great to see you. And you're a leader in the field and doing a lot of great work. The market is on fire right now, literally is on fire with investment, crossover, private technology into the government realm for defense. We all know what's going on in the physical hardware world. We see AI factories. So everything's driving to the conversation where cybersecurity and AI infrastructure are all one thing. The mission's the same. But the applications on the defense tech are booming. Explain the macro right now. What's the biggest change since we spoke last year?
Dave DeWalt
>> Well, thanks for having me, John. It's a great pleasure to be with you, my friend. And a good topic right now. It's very germane to what's happening around the world for a lot of reasons. I call it almost like a perfect storm. And this perfect storm is a series of conditions and confluences coming together. And we can all read about them. But when you really break them down, we've watched this incredible technology innovation now, maybe with frontier models and AI's development, agentic autonomous systems, AI on the edge, really opening up new opportunities in the defense tech, but also new opportunities for the offense as well. And then when you combine geopolitical tensions with all the things we've seen, we start to create crises that are happening with Iran and also with Israel, of course, in the United States, but in Russia, Ukraine and other parts of the South China Sea. And it's a very challenging market. And then you create almost a deregulated environment now where you can bring technology very quickly to market without a lot of guardrails, which is great for capitalism, but at times can also be bad for the bad guys or good for the bad guys. And we create this environment where we've got a boom in defense tech. And this is probably the golden age I've ever seen with what's going on in this market. 35 years doing this. I don't know, maybe 1999 .com. And this is about the same era to me.
John Furrier
>> I know you just came back from Black Hat. And I want to get your thoughts on this because you mentioned the bad guys. my two favorite football teams are the New England Patriots and the San Francisco 49ers. And the Niners, as you know, had the West Coast offense back in the 80s. And they pioneered.
Dave DeWalt
>> Are you allowed to root for two teams?
John Furrier
>> Well, they're different conferences.Okay. Okay. So, I'm okay. I adjust the rationale. But look at Joe Montana. They had Bill Walsh. They actually pioneered score more points than the other guy. You win. You had the old thesis of defense wins championships. And obviously when Brady was at the Patriots, they would throw up mega numbers. So it was really an offensive game and not a lot of defense. Now you're seeing that come back. Compare that to cyber because we're seeing now more offensive capabilities with AI. The bad guys get better. They're putting more points on the board. There's long tail opportunities. You're seeing it every day. So there's a lot more offense going on. And we've always been playing defense. And talk about this dynamic. This kind of came out of my reading the tea leaves at Black Hat. That's great, more offense is great to protect, to be on offense, but they have offense. Right. How do you explain this phenomenon? Or do you believe it to be kind of a good, maybe it's not the perfect analogy, but it's one that I can think of.
Dave DeWalt
>> Yeah, no, it's a very good analogy. And by the way, I'm a Philadelphia Eagles fan. And of course, the Patriots are kind of our arch rival because we've lost to them a few times. And that guy, Tom Brady, who's a great guy, by the way. But they always say there's two things you can never leave, your mama and your football team. So that's where I'm from, Philadelphia. But coming to your question, offense and defense, it's an amazing shift of what's just happened. I was CEO of FireEye and Mandiant and McAfee, and I spent a lot of years defending. Defend, defend, defend. You never cross a line on the defense towards what you now think of could be offense. But what you're now starting to see is platforms that can be developed, one of which is, called Horizon3.ai, who's built this incredible autonomous agentic platform who can now do dual use as well. Not only can it be one of the strongest defenders, because now at machine speed you can defend and you can constantly monitor attack surface, pen test that attack surface, heal the attack surface, but you can also use that technology for offense. So not only are you seeing the private sector producing better and better defenders, that same defender can be an offense. And then you throw in the other side of the coin, which is Anthropic's and OpenAI's models, initially starting with Opus and then Mythos and Fable 5 and Daybreak from OpenAI you now have this incredible model that can produce vulnerabilities and Understand and ingest source code or binaries and produce vulnerabilities and not only can they produce a vulnerability in a binary they can create multiple chaining of vulnerabilities, creating zero -day exploits at machine speed. So now you have the attackers having models of AI that can essentially do things that humans took months and maybe even years to cultivate an offensive cyber weapon. They're doing them in minutes, hours. So we have this incredible offense and defensive problem. And last thing I'd say, I never thought in all my years, almost three decades in cybersecurity, would I see a scenario where an American company is doing a cyber exercise, in this case, OpenAI, that ended up breaching a French company, Hugging Face, that then defended itself with a Chinese company, an open -weight, open -source company. Where would this ever happen? A Chinese open -source company coming to the rescue of a French company that an American company is attacking. But this is all in the age of agentic. That wasn't humans behind it. That was largely technology behind it. So what an era we're in.
John Furrier
>> Yeah, yeah.it opens up so many questions. And this is why I brought it up. Because if you look at, go back 17 years ago when we started theCUBE and SiliconANGLE. the big conversation there was, if you remember, the perimeter is dead. Because back then you had perimeter-based security. And then you had the cloud. So surface area is all over the place. And then now they rationalize that and they build platforms and tools, best of breed. But now the surface area, if you look at what you just said, it's not only bigger, it's everywhere. You can inject and change the surface area by injecting a binary. So now you have a completely different situational awareness problem. How do you think about that? And how are successful entrepreneurs kind of putting that filter in? And how are they thinking? Because you've got to think differently. It's a systems game. Systems agents are working across apps and platforms. it seems to be much more of an operating system thinking than just, hey, my platform, here's an API and an MCP server. Right.
Dave DeWalt
>> I mean, John, you're hitting it right on, right? We have this era of AI versus AI now, right? There's no doubt about it. What can the good guys do to protect AI and create new opportunities in AI? And what can the bad guys do using AI? And it's a battle. And it's created almost an entirely new attack surface for companies to defend against, to your point. So how do I protect against a rogue agent? I programmed the agent to do a certain thing, but the agent became smarter and smarter and escaped the sandbox and breached another company. So how do we start thinking about the attack surface of that? And what's really interesting in the age of AI, which I think you'll find interesting as well, we're watching the entire world flatten. It used to be the United States and Israel give Israel a lot of credit, especially in cyber and defense tech and America. You're watching this almost balkanization occur of NATO countries, Asian countries, who are now being forced to innovate because largely many of them were forced to contribute more to NATO defense. So we went from 1 % to 2 .5 % to 5%. When you see a 500 % increase in defense spending country by country, this is mammoth. So it creates innovation, creates new things that are occurring, and now the world's innovating in a way that we've never seen.
John Furrier
>> That's why I love the AI infrastructure convergence with this because all the things you mentioned, things are popping in my head. Sovereignty, check. That's a cloud AI problem. Other factors that are more domain specific is cyber. and this is where I think it crosses over. So the question for you now is, what's your view on the advances in some of these areas? I won't say old school, but previous categories were mechanisms that people would deploy, could be hardware, software, electronics, precision -guided capabilities. Those were kind of things that were out there. What changes have come down the pike in these areas? What are some of the innovations? I was talking with HawkEye 360, your company. they're doing something very cool just around RF in space, but what that enables is a whole other intelligence level that changes something else on land. But they're not in the land business. They're in space and maritime right now, but they're collecting critical RF information. That's like this changes. What are the changes in those areas?
Dave DeWalt
>> Well, let's talk about it. if you look at the history of mankind for a second, whenever we discovered a new domain, we fought wars over it. Right. We discovered lands, armies would fight. We discovered oceans. We would have naval battles. We discovered the air. We'd have battles in the air. We've discovered space. We're having a race to space. We discovered cyber. It became a domain, the fifth domain. We had battles in cyber. We continue to. What's happened now is every domain now has cyber in it. So instead of cyber being its own digital domain with the Internet, you now have cyber everywhere, maritime, air, ground, space, and the wars are being fought in hybrid ways now. So when Venezuela occurred, as an example, what happened? A lot of cyber activities occurred precursor to kinetic activities. So it's an integrated system. The government of the United States is forcing a multi-domain cyber initiative. So we're watching a lot of change across the world.
John Furrier
>> So in multi-domain, I love that you brought that up, because I was going to ask it, but I'll get to it now. What does that mean? Because I like this idea that if cyber is native through all the domains, it makes total sense. What other horizontal factors need to be in place, and what's specific to that? So cyber makes sense, and how does that change cyber and whatnot?
Dave DeWalt
>> Yeah, so you now think about your question of hardware and software and capability. Now it has to be wrapped in almost every form factor for almost every domain. So how do I protect a tank or a Jeep or a truck or a car from a cyber attack? And not only is that cyber attack potentially a spear phishing or an intrusion digitally, it could be an intrusion through radio frequencies, electronic emissions kind of capabilities, airwaves, things like AirDrop and Bluetooth become vectors of attack for these physical systems. We now have to protect everywhere we go. So you mentioned HawkEye 360, looking at radio frequencies in space to ground, picking up RF and patterns of life of every RF that's coming off Earth. What is the anomalous behavior of a GPS jammer over here, a hypersonic over here, a car driving on the freeway over here, a boat or a ship on the ocean? And you learn about patterns of life, but you also learn that there's risk to all of that. and we're now entering an era where there's cyber warfare in space and ground, on air, and it's just all becoming ubiquitous.
John Furrier
>> It's interesting, we all have watched movies or we have our favorite movies around some military backdrop. There's always a scene in whatever movie where they say, let's get a satellite image of what's going on in that camp or they got guns and they're deploying stuff, so pictures were basically the visual. But you can't see what's going on in the bunker. So this is kind of where this multi -domain, multi -tech approach comes in. And I think what to me jumps out about Hawkeye is that it's better than a picture. But if you've got the picture and the other sensors, this is kind of where it goes. Again, this is a mashup of technologies. Have you seen this before? Is this net new for us I was thinking? Because it makes sense. Why weren't we doing that before? This makes total sense. Why wouldn't you have the most complete intelligence picture possible?
Dave DeWalt
>> My favorite movie was WarGames. Remember that movie?
John Furrier
>> Yeah, I do.
Dave DeWalt
>> way back in the day, and suddenly they are playing tic-tac-toe to end the game, and the computer had taken over. We're in that era now, or Terminator when Skynet was going on. And I say that tongue-in-cheek, but at the same time, the power of these systems is getting so great that we have to put guardrails, we have to be more careful with what we're doing. We don't want to slow down commerce and capitalism, but the power of this tech is becoming so great, and the weapons that we're able to create from that, we really need to protect. The idea of a weapon of mass destruction was really thought about atomically or nuclearly before. Now, you have AI models training on DNA and RNA to produce new viruses and pathogens. that could create a vector of attack.
John Furrier
>> Yeah, of course.
Dave DeWalt
>> So we're watching all new ones emerging, just like it happened during COVID. We now have the ability with AI to create new viruses, maybe even more lethal. What do we have to do to get that right? Defend against that properly and let defense get ahead of the offense. And this is a point in time for mankind, in my opinion, where we have to just take a pause, make sure we get defense ahead of offense, get the right regulation on it, and make sure that the gap doesn't get too wide, too fast, and in the hands of bad people too quickly.
John Furrier
>> You know, I love when I do these CUBE interviews, there's always a new technology, whether it's a disruptive enabler or an accelerant enabler. There's always the good side and the bad side. And, you know, in military, it was always the generals had this, like there was a room of people that knew military. They would have their caucuses. They would convene and gather and do all that thinking. But it's kind of been democratized. So what is the current narrative and state of the union, if you will, in the defense sector around government experts that do this for a living and commercial experts like yourself and entrepreneurs? What is the joint narrative? Because we see what SpaceX did. They beat NASA at everything that they did. And that helps everyone gets leveled up. But what's the narrative of this new ecosystem of participants, because it is a collective intelligence at this point. As you mentioned, things got to be horizontal. They got to cross platforms.
Dave DeWalt
>> Well, you really hit on it, John, because I'm really proud of this administration for a number of things. And there's a lot we could talk about there. But one thing they've really been able to do is A, infuse cyber into all domains. B, partner with private sector in a way that can create accelerants of innovation to the warfighter or to the mission that's needed. We used to have a very challenging and difficult procurement engine that was really an oligopoly of defense primes. We've kind of broken that open now to allow new entrants to come along, new technology to come along. They've also created a lot of innovation capital so that the Defense Innovation Unit or DARPA can really create innovation early in the life cycle. So America's getting its mojo in a way that we have never seen before, and that's a really amazing thing, in my opinion.
John Furrier
>> I want to get to the battlefield. In fact, I was sharing with Snehal at Horizon3 earlier today that around 2017, I think it was 2017 or 2018, I participated in a Chatham House Rules thing that General Mattis put on. And this was right around the JEDI contract that Amazon was working on, tactical edge and a lot of DoD stuff. And the number one thing he said was friendly fire is one of the highest forms of casualties. Not having the right systems, knowing who you're shooting at. And again, at that time, but when you factor in drone swarms, machines, there's kind of a friendly fire problem. meaning we could hurt ourselves if we don't know what we're doing. Because if there's drones and there's agents out there, does that come up? Or am I a little bit reading it too early on this? But I'd imagine there'd have to be some sort of software intelligence around the congestion problem, the airspace. Drones alone could take down a helicopter. I could imagine there's a friendly fire dynamic, not with humans involved, but machines. And of course, the side effect impacts could be systems could come down. What are your thoughts on that?
Dave DeWalt
>> Like we talked about multi-domain integration of digital and cyber and all of the domains beginning to have to work together and coordinate space tips and cues to aerial. Aerial tips and cues to maritime. Maritime tips and cues to ground or to cyber. We need multi-domain intelligence and communications integrated to all of them and securely so we don't get friendly fire problems. We don't have issues like we have sometimes kinetically on the battlefield. And that technology is here now. I'm sure you know Palantir. The Maven Smart System has created a hell of an integration platform. There are other startups doing similar things to enable us to ingest. We invested in a cool company called Armada AI, who essentially takes compute and moves it to the point of need for the warfighter for the mission. And it's like a suitcase-sized data center all the way to a truck-sized container data center. And you can move it out in the desert on an oil rig or wherever you might need it. And now you have massive compute for data ingestion and communications that you have to go to satellite or something else to do to really create more. So they light up essentially the theater where they might be constrained on bandwidth.
John Furrier
>> You can have a Tesla running around in a Waymo in San Francisco, but you can't be doing that in Ukraine.
Dave DeWalt
>> Right.Because you need power and you need compute. So if you can create small modular reactors, SMRs, at the point of need, and you can put ruggedized compute at the point of need, now you can start to use things like electronic warfare, electromagnetic pulsing. You can start to use lasers. You can start to use non -kinetic weaponry that's safer as well to bring down kinetic threats that might be occurring.
John Furrier
>> Let's talk about the battlefield and decision -making, because you mentioned the Terminator and Skynet, which everyone kind of uses as a metaphor in a bad way. But it was technically a marvel if you think about the sci -fi of it. Decision -making at the commander level and at the edge to the warfighter. How does AI impact that? How do you see that playing out? Because that's an area you're going to start to see a lot more. We hear about decision loops. That's an AI term, looping, recursing through. pre -fill, decode, and all that tokenization stuff that we talk about with NVIDIA, that's going to be a key thing on the battlefield where you have to have essentially rack -scale clusters available, decision -making, the humans in the loop, the agents, the machine speed. How does that play out in your mind?
Dave DeWalt
>> Well, we're starting to see scenarios, John, where autonomy is beginning to be a multiplier of humans, right? So think about this at every domain that we had talked about on the ground, we're starting to see soldiers and other types of ground equipment be completely autonomous. So if we want to be able to move a truck or a tank or a jeep or something into the battlefield, we can move autonomous vehicles into the field, having humans in the background, saving lives. We're already seeing that in Ukraine battlefield today with aerial drones, where you're using FPVs or fiber optic cabling on drones that are essentially able to fly and be able to eradicate a target. And there's no human involved necessarily with that defense. That's happened in maritime now where we see drones. We have a company called Saronic doing that, where they build ships that are completely autonomous to essentially rescue an Apache helicopter pilot that was in the Strait of Hormuz. Or now more and more monitor the Coast or deliver goods across the ocean. So many things are moving autonomous, and in that, you have to be careful because the autonomy is programmed. And that can be hacked, and if that gets hacked, what happens? So we have so many new levels of defense and offense.
John Furrier
>> Again, back to my earlier question around the surface area. It's not only a surface area, but below the surface is code. So you have all kinds of code involved. All right, well this is, first of all, thank you so much for sharing that insight. really primary data on what's happening.
Dave DeWalt
>> Are they more scared or less scared? I'm not sure.
John Furrier
>> Well, no, they're hard problems, and engineers love to solve hard problems. So to me, the more you're transparent about it, the more it'll work. And there's a sovereignty angle, too, which I love. What is your focus now? Obviously, you're doing a lot of work and really appreciate what you're doing, and certainly at the government level, bringing the ideas and the leadership there. But investments, you mentioned a few of them. Is there a thesis you've got right now? Is there a certain pattern that you're looking at? What jumps out at you? What's your focus right now?
Dave DeWalt
>> So, NightDragon's entirely focused in on what we call securing the world for tomorrow. So my entire focus is on security and safety across every domain from space to ground to cyber to AI to quantum. Whenever we see a new sort of domain coming, and now we see the quantum domain coming, how do we secure the quantum domain? And what does quantum do to other domains where we got to protect that? That's called the post-quantum computing era, PQC, because it's going to affect encryption and decryption. So we're focused on that. What does AI do to all those markets? We're already working on a lot of those areas. We also see next generation drones in space now. So you're going to see lower orbit satellites, but you're going to see drones flying all over doing inspection, training, maintenance, things like that. Also, they could do cyber attacks and electronic warfare in drones in space. So wherever there's a threat or a risk, we want to have an investment model to secure the world.
John Furrier
>> I would just tell people that it's very difficult what you do because what you just laid out is a great mission. 100 % love the mission. However, the tide shifted. It reminds me of the days when I broke into the industry when I was in my late teens. The computer industry was a term. The computer industry. And that was just computers. and they put them into business, government bought them, and people did stuff on them. They bought software. You were involved in many of those companies. Now, if you want to secure the world for tomorrow, you have to build it on the right stuff, which means you have to know everything about the stack so you kind of have a compatibility matrix, I'm sure, that it must match the ability to execute.
Dave DeWalt
>> You surround yourself with smarter people than you are, and that's what I do, too.
John Furrier
>> But that's central to your thesis, right? You have to say, hey, if I'm going to have intelligence, across domains, then it has to be architected properly.
Dave DeWalt
>> And something we tried to do, you mentioned this earlier, was we know at NightDragon we're not going to know it all. But what we want to do is create a platform of people, of partners, government, who can help us with these theses. So working closely with the government and the warfighter, you know what the threat is. You know what the risk could be. Working with partners like the Primes and the Global Primes, system integrators, you kind of know if they could sell it or deliver it. Working with your advisors like generals and admirals and CISOs, you know if they'd buy it. So if you get all that, you can come up with what the next threat risk problem is and that's what we hope to get.
John Furrier
>> I have to ask you this question because you're a historian as well as a leader in what you're doing now. In the old days, when you were running companies, you had a department, business development, you had salespeople, enterprise sales, oh, get the customer and there's a well-known process for that go-to-market. BizDev would build relationships with partners. Some Barney deals as they call them in the old school vernacular. But partnerships were pretty much let's do a business deal, maybe some technology transfer. It seems that with cloud that's changed. And now with the AI infrastructure and the role that it's impacting, accelerating, the role of being an ecosystem partner has changed. Could you share your vision on what's changed or what's not changed? Because it seems to me that there's a lot more co-designing going on, on a lot deeper conversations than simply papering, hey, we signed a deal, we're doing go-to-market together, we're doing a little licensing of technology, we'll integrate it on our side, maybe it's a little slower. What's the new form of partnering in this era?
Dave DeWalt
>> Ironically, there's almost a back to the future happening here, a full lifecycle that's occurred, because now in this AI era, you have a lot of Fortune 100, Fortune 500 type companies that are getting disrupted. So you end up with primes. You take a Lockheed or a Northrop or a large prime, suddenly all this autonomy comes along and access to procurement comes along and they have to change. So partnering became more important to them than ever as well. Or you take a Visa or a Mastercard who didn't worry so much about cybersecurity, they worried about it, but now they have more. They built their own stuff. Now they're buying companies and partnering in ways we've never seen. You look at the blockchain and all the Coinbase of the world. You start to see every era require partnering to be better because you don't want a catastrophic breach or threat to your environment. So it's come all the way around.
John Furrier
>> Yeah, it's a whole other world. And, again, the game is kind of still the same, but it's just a different fashion, I guess. Thanks for coming on theCUBE.
Dave DeWalt
>> I really appreciate it. Thanks for having me.
John Furrier
>> Dave DeWalt, he's an innovator but also leading the charge on defense tech. And this is the kind of stuff we want to unpack with this program. Figure out where it's going? what does it mean to us and again where the innovation is because safety and security are paramount in the ai era but it's affecting up and down the stack from the AI factories all the way to people on the streets and of course protecting our society thanks for watching
>> John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We are here at theCUBE's NYSE studio. Of course, we have our Palo Alto studio connecting Silicon Valley to Wall Street. This is our new Defense Tech series. We talk to the leaders who are exploring all the new business models, technology innovation. And of course, the tide has shifted with AI as the battlefield and decisions are being made on the warfare front. Everything's changed. Dave DeWalt is here. He's the CEO and founder of NightDragon, investor, former entrepreneur, CEO, now driving and innovating. Dave, great to see you. And you're a leader in the field and doing a lot of great work. The market is on fire right now, literally is on fire with investment, crossover, private technology into the government realm for defense. We all know what's going on in the physical hardware world. We see AI factories. So everything's driving to the conversation where cybersecurity and AI infrastructure are all one thing. The mission's the same. But the applications on the defense tech are booming. Explain the macro right now. What's the biggest change since we spoke last year?
Dave DeWalt
>> Well, thanks for having me, John. It's a great pleasure to be with you, my friend. And a good topic right now. It's very germane to what's happening around the world for a lot of reasons. I call it almost like a perfect storm. And this perfect storm is a series of conditions and confluences coming together. And we can all read about them. But when you really break them down, we've watched this incredible technology innovation now, maybe with frontier models and AI's development, agentic autonomous systems, AI on the edge, really opening up new opportunities in the defense tech, but also new opportunities for the offense as well. And then when you combine geopolitical tensions with all the things we've seen, we start to create crises that are happening with Iran and also with Israel, of course, in the United States, but in Russia, Ukraine and other parts of the South China Sea. And it's a very challenging market. And then you create almost a deregulated environment now where you can bring technology very quickly to market without a lot of guardrails, which is great for capitalism, but at times can also be bad for the bad guys or good for the bad guys. And we create this environment where we've got a boom in defense tech. And this is probably the golden age I've ever seen with what's going on in this market. 35 years doing this. I don't know, maybe 1999 .com. And this is about the same era to me.
John Furrier
>> I know you just came back from Black Hat. And I want to get your thoughts on this because you mentioned the bad guys. my two favorite football teams are the New England Patriots and the San Francisco 49ers. And the Niners, as you know, had the West Coast offense back in the 80s. And they pioneered.
Dave DeWalt
>> Are you allowed to root for two teams?
John Furrier
>> Well, they're different conferences.Okay. Okay. So, I'm okay. I adjust the rationale. But look at Joe Montana. They had Bill Walsh. They actually pioneered score more points than the other guy. You win. You had the old thesis of defense wins championships. And obviously when Brady was at the Patriots, they would throw up mega numbers. So it was really an offensive game and not a lot of defense. Now you're seeing that come back. Compare that to cyber because we're seeing now more offensive capabilities with AI. The bad guys get better. They're putting more points on the board. There's long tail opportunities. You're seeing it every day. So there's a lot more offense going on. And we've always been playing defense. And talk about this dynamic. This kind of came out of my reading the tea leaves at Black Hat. That's great, more offense is great to protect, to be on offense, but they have offense. Right. How do you explain this phenomenon? Or do you believe it to be kind of a good, maybe it's not the perfect analogy, but it's one that I can think of.
Dave DeWalt
>> Yeah, no, it's a very good analogy. And by the way, I'm a Philadelphia Eagles fan. And of course, the Patriots are kind of our arch rival because we've lost to them a few times. And that guy, Tom Brady, who's a great guy, by the way. But they always say there's two things you can never leave, your mama and your football team. So that's where I'm from, Philadelphia. But coming to your question, offense and defense, it's an amazing shift of what's just happened. I was CEO of FireEye and Mandiant and McAfee, and I spent a lot of years defending. Defend, defend, defend. You never cross a line on the defense towards what you now think of could be offense. But what you're now starting to see is platforms that can be developed, one of which is, called Horizon3.ai, who's built this incredible autonomous agentic platform who can now do dual use as well. Not only can it be one of the strongest defenders, because now at machine speed you can defend and you can constantly monitor attack surface, pen test that attack surface, heal the attack surface, but you can also use that technology for offense. So not only are you seeing the private sector producing better and better defenders, that same defender can be an offense. And then you throw in the other side of the coin, which is Anthropic's and OpenAI's models, initially starting with Opus and then Mythos and Fable 5 and Daybreak from OpenAI you now have this incredible model that can produce vulnerabilities and Understand and ingest source code or binaries and produce vulnerabilities and not only can they produce a vulnerability in a binary they can create multiple chaining of vulnerabilities, creating zero -day exploits at machine speed. So now you have the attackers having models of AI that can essentially do things that humans took months and maybe even years to cultivate an offensive cyber weapon. They're doing them in minutes, hours. So we have this incredible offense and defensive problem. And last thing I'd say, I never thought in all my years, almost three decades in cybersecurity, would I see a scenario where an American company is doing a cyber exercise, in this case, OpenAI, that ended up breaching a French company, Hugging Face, that then defended itself with a Chinese company, an open -weight, open -source company. Where would this ever happen? A Chinese open -source company coming to the rescue of a French company that an American company is attacking. But this is all in the age of agentic. That wasn't humans behind it. That was largely technology behind it. So what an era we're in.
John Furrier
>> Yeah, yeah.it opens up so many questions. And this is why I brought it up. Because if you look at, go back 17 years ago when we started theCUBE and SiliconANGLE. the big conversation there was, if you remember, the perimeter is dead. Because back then you had perimeter-based security. And then you had the cloud. So surface area is all over the place. And then now they rationalize that and they build platforms and tools, best of breed. But now the surface area, if you look at what you just said, it's not only bigger, it's everywhere. You can inject and change the surface area by injecting a binary. So now you have a completely different situational awareness problem. How do you think about that? And how are successful entrepreneurs kind of putting that filter in? And how are they thinking? Because you've got to think differently. It's a systems game. Systems agents are working across apps and platforms. it seems to be much more of an operating system thinking than just, hey, my platform, here's an API and an MCP server. Right.
Dave DeWalt
>> I mean, John, you're hitting it right on, right? We have this era of AI versus AI now, right? There's no doubt about it. What can the good guys do to protect AI and create new opportunities in AI? And what can the bad guys do using AI? And it's a battle. And it's created almost an entirely new attack surface for companies to defend against, to your point. So how do I protect against a rogue agent? I programmed the agent to do a certain thing, but the agent became smarter and smarter and escaped the sandbox and breached another company. So how do we start thinking about the attack surface of that? And what's really interesting in the age of AI, which I think you'll find interesting as well, we're watching the entire world flatten. It used to be the United States and Israel give Israel a lot of credit, especially in cyber and defense tech and America. You're watching this almost balkanization occur of NATO countries, Asian countries, who are now being forced to innovate because largely many of them were forced to contribute more to NATO defense. So we went from 1 % to 2 .5 % to 5%. When you see a 500 % increase in defense spending country by country, this is mammoth. So it creates innovation, creates new things that are occurring, and now the world's innovating in a way that we've never seen.
John Furrier
>> That's why I love the AI infrastructure convergence with this because all the things you mentioned, things are popping in my head. Sovereignty, check. That's a cloud AI problem. Other factors that are more domain specific is cyber. and this is where I think it crosses over. So the question for you now is, what's your view on the advances in some of these areas? I won't say old school, but previous categories were mechanisms that people would deploy, could be hardware, software, electronics, precision -guided capabilities. Those were kind of things that were out there. What changes have come down the pike in these areas? What are some of the innovations? I was talking with HawkEye 360, your company. they're doing something very cool just around RF in space, but what that enables is a whole other intelligence level that changes something else on land. But they're not in the land business. They're in space and maritime right now, but they're collecting critical RF information. That's like this changes. What are the changes in those areas?
Dave DeWalt
>> Well, let's talk about it. if you look at the history of mankind for a second, whenever we discovered a new domain, we fought wars over it. Right. We discovered lands, armies would fight. We discovered oceans. We would have naval battles. We discovered the air. We'd have battles in the air. We've discovered space. We're having a race to space. We discovered cyber. It became a domain, the fifth domain. We had battles in cyber. We continue to. What's happened now is every domain now has cyber in it. So instead of cyber being its own digital domain with the Internet, you now have cyber everywhere, maritime, air, ground, space, and the wars are being fought in hybrid ways now. So when Venezuela occurred, as an example, what happened? A lot of cyber activities occurred precursor to kinetic activities. So it's an integrated system. The government of the United States is forcing a multi-domain cyber initiative. So we're watching a lot of change across the world.
John Furrier
>> So in multi-domain, I love that you brought that up, because I was going to ask it, but I'll get to it now. What does that mean? Because I like this idea that if cyber is native through all the domains, it makes total sense. What other horizontal factors need to be in place, and what's specific to that? So cyber makes sense, and how does that change cyber and whatnot?
Dave DeWalt
>> Yeah, so you now think about your question of hardware and software and capability. Now it has to be wrapped in almost every form factor for almost every domain. So how do I protect a tank or a Jeep or a truck or a car from a cyber attack? And not only is that cyber attack potentially a spear phishing or an intrusion digitally, it could be an intrusion through radio frequencies, electronic emissions kind of capabilities, airwaves, things like AirDrop and Bluetooth become vectors of attack for these physical systems. We now have to protect everywhere we go. So you mentioned HawkEye 360, looking at radio frequencies in space to ground, picking up RF and patterns of life of every RF that's coming off Earth. What is the anomalous behavior of a GPS jammer over here, a hypersonic over here, a car driving on the freeway over here, a boat or a ship on the ocean? And you learn about patterns of life, but you also learn that there's risk to all of that. and we're now entering an era where there's cyber warfare in space and ground, on air, and it's just all becoming ubiquitous.
John Furrier
>> It's interesting, we all have watched movies or we have our favorite movies around some military backdrop. There's always a scene in whatever movie where they say, let's get a satellite image of what's going on in that camp or they got guns and they're deploying stuff, so pictures were basically the visual. But you can't see what's going on in the bunker. So this is kind of where this multi -domain, multi -tech approach comes in. And I think what to me jumps out about Hawkeye is that it's better than a picture. But if you've got the picture and the other sensors, this is kind of where it goes. Again, this is a mashup of technologies. Have you seen this before? Is this net new for us I was thinking? Because it makes sense. Why weren't we doing that before? This makes total sense. Why wouldn't you have the most complete intelligence picture possible?
Dave DeWalt
>> My favorite movie was WarGames. Remember that movie?
John Furrier
>> Yeah, I do.
Dave DeWalt
>> way back in the day, and suddenly they are playing tic-tac-toe to end the game, and the computer had taken over. We're in that era now, or Terminator when Skynet was going on. And I say that tongue-in-cheek, but at the same time, the power of these systems is getting so great that we have to put guardrails, we have to be more careful with what we're doing. We don't want to slow down commerce and capitalism, but the power of this tech is becoming so great, and the weapons that we're able to create from that, we really need to protect. The idea of a weapon of mass destruction was really thought about atomically or nuclearly before. Now, you have AI models training on DNA and RNA to produce new viruses and pathogens. that could create a vector of attack.
John Furrier
>> Yeah, of course.
Dave DeWalt
>> So we're watching all new ones emerging, just like it happened during COVID. We now have the ability with AI to create new viruses, maybe even more lethal. What do we have to do to get that right? Defend against that properly and let defense get ahead of the offense. And this is a point in time for mankind, in my opinion, where we have to just take a pause, make sure we get defense ahead of offense, get the right regulation on it, and make sure that the gap doesn't get too wide, too fast, and in the hands of bad people too quickly.
John Furrier
>> You know, I love when I do these CUBE interviews, there's always a new technology, whether it's a disruptive enabler or an accelerant enabler. There's always the good side and the bad side. And, you know, in military, it was always the generals had this, like there was a room of people that knew military. They would have their caucuses. They would convene and gather and do all that thinking. But it's kind of been democratized. So what is the current narrative and state of the union, if you will, in the defense sector around government experts that do this for a living and commercial experts like yourself and entrepreneurs? What is the joint narrative? Because we see what SpaceX did. They beat NASA at everything that they did. And that helps everyone gets leveled up. But what's the narrative of this new ecosystem of participants, because it is a collective intelligence at this point. As you mentioned, things got to be horizontal. They got to cross platforms.
Dave DeWalt
>> Well, you really hit on it, John, because I'm really proud of this administration for a number of things. And there's a lot we could talk about there. But one thing they've really been able to do is A, infuse cyber into all domains. B, partner with private sector in a way that can create accelerants of innovation to the warfighter or to the mission that's needed. We used to have a very challenging and difficult procurement engine that was really an oligopoly of defense primes. We've kind of broken that open now to allow new entrants to come along, new technology to come along. They've also created a lot of innovation capital so that the Defense Innovation Unit or DARPA can really create innovation early in the life cycle. So America's getting its mojo in a way that we have never seen before, and that's a really amazing thing, in my opinion.
John Furrier
>> I want to get to the battlefield. In fact, I was sharing with Snehal at Horizon3 earlier today that around 2017, I think it was 2017 or 2018, I participated in a Chatham House Rules thing that General Mattis put on. And this was right around the JEDI contract that Amazon was working on, tactical edge and a lot of DoD stuff. And the number one thing he said was friendly fire is one of the highest forms of casualties. Not having the right systems, knowing who you're shooting at. And again, at that time, but when you factor in drone swarms, machines, there's kind of a friendly fire problem. meaning we could hurt ourselves if we don't know what we're doing. Because if there's drones and there's agents out there, does that come up? Or am I a little bit reading it too early on this? But I'd imagine there'd have to be some sort of software intelligence around the congestion problem, the airspace. Drones alone could take down a helicopter. I could imagine there's a friendly fire dynamic, not with humans involved, but machines. And of course, the side effect impacts could be systems could come down. What are your thoughts on that?
Dave DeWalt
>> Like we talked about multi-domain integration of digital and cyber and all of the domains beginning to have to work together and coordinate space tips and cues to aerial. Aerial tips and cues to maritime. Maritime tips and cues to ground or to cyber. We need multi-domain intelligence and communications integrated to all of them and securely so we don't get friendly fire problems. We don't have issues like we have sometimes kinetically on the battlefield. And that technology is here now. I'm sure you know Palantir. The Maven Smart System has created a hell of an integration platform. There are other startups doing similar things to enable us to ingest. We invested in a cool company called Armada AI, who essentially takes compute and moves it to the point of need for the warfighter for the mission. And it's like a suitcase-sized data center all the way to a truck-sized container data center. And you can move it out in the desert on an oil rig or wherever you might need it. And now you have massive compute for data ingestion and communications that you have to go to satellite or something else to do to really create more. So they light up essentially the theater where they might be constrained on bandwidth.
John Furrier
>> You can have a Tesla running around in a Waymo in San Francisco, but you can't be doing that in Ukraine.
Dave DeWalt
>> Right.Because you need power and you need compute. So if you can create small modular reactors, SMRs, at the point of need, and you can put ruggedized compute at the point of need, now you can start to use things like electronic warfare, electromagnetic pulsing. You can start to use lasers. You can start to use non -kinetic weaponry that's safer as well to bring down kinetic threats that might be occurring.
John Furrier
>> Let's talk about the battlefield and decision -making, because you mentioned the Terminator and Skynet, which everyone kind of uses as a metaphor in a bad way. But it was technically a marvel if you think about the sci -fi of it. Decision -making at the commander level and at the edge to the warfighter. How does AI impact that? How do you see that playing out? Because that's an area you're going to start to see a lot more. We hear about decision loops. That's an AI term, looping, recursing through. pre -fill, decode, and all that tokenization stuff that we talk about with NVIDIA, that's going to be a key thing on the battlefield where you have to have essentially rack -scale clusters available, decision -making, the humans in the loop, the agents, the machine speed. How does that play out in your mind?
Dave DeWalt
>> Well, we're starting to see scenarios, John, where autonomy is beginning to be a multiplier of humans, right? So think about this at every domain that we had talked about on the ground, we're starting to see soldiers and other types of ground equipment be completely autonomous. So if we want to be able to move a truck or a tank or a jeep or something into the battlefield, we can move autonomous vehicles into the field, having humans in the background, saving lives. We're already seeing that in Ukraine battlefield today with aerial drones, where you're using FPVs or fiber optic cabling on drones that are essentially able to fly and be able to eradicate a target. And there's no human involved necessarily with that defense. That's happened in maritime now where we see drones. We have a company called Saronic doing that, where they build ships that are completely autonomous to essentially rescue an Apache helicopter pilot that was in the Strait of Hormuz. Or now more and more monitor the Coast or deliver goods across the ocean. So many things are moving autonomous, and in that, you have to be careful because the autonomy is programmed. And that can be hacked, and if that gets hacked, what happens? So we have so many new levels of defense and offense.
John Furrier
>> Again, back to my earlier question around the surface area. It's not only a surface area, but below the surface is code. So you have all kinds of code involved. All right, well this is, first of all, thank you so much for sharing that insight. really primary data on what's happening.
Dave DeWalt
>> Are they more scared or less scared? I'm not sure.
John Furrier
>> Well, no, they're hard problems, and engineers love to solve hard problems. So to me, the more you're transparent about it, the more it'll work. And there's a sovereignty angle, too, which I love. What is your focus now? Obviously, you're doing a lot of work and really appreciate what you're doing, and certainly at the government level, bringing the ideas and the leadership there. But investments, you mentioned a few of them. Is there a thesis you've got right now? Is there a certain pattern that you're looking at? What jumps out at you? What's your focus right now?
Dave DeWalt
>> So, NightDragon's entirely focused in on what we call securing the world for tomorrow. So my entire focus is on security and safety across every domain from space to ground to cyber to AI to quantum. Whenever we see a new sort of domain coming, and now we see the quantum domain coming, how do we secure the quantum domain? And what does quantum do to other domains where we got to protect that? That's called the post-quantum computing era, PQC, because it's going to affect encryption and decryption. So we're focused on that. What does AI do to all those markets? We're already working on a lot of those areas. We also see next generation drones in space now. So you're going to see lower orbit satellites, but you're going to see drones flying all over doing inspection, training, maintenance, things like that. Also, they could do cyber attacks and electronic warfare in drones in space. So wherever there's a threat or a risk, we want to have an investment model to secure the world.
John Furrier
>> I would just tell people that it's very difficult what you do because what you just laid out is a great mission. 100 % love the mission. However, the tide shifted. It reminds me of the days when I broke into the industry when I was in my late teens. The computer industry was a term. The computer industry. And that was just computers. and they put them into business, government bought them, and people did stuff on them. They bought software. You were involved in many of those companies. Now, if you want to secure the world for tomorrow, you have to build it on the right stuff, which means you have to know everything about the stack so you kind of have a compatibility matrix, I'm sure, that it must match the ability to execute.
Dave DeWalt
>> You surround yourself with smarter people than you are, and that's what I do, too.
John Furrier
>> But that's central to your thesis, right? You have to say, hey, if I'm going to have intelligence, across domains, then it has to be architected properly.
Dave DeWalt
>> And something we tried to do, you mentioned this earlier, was we know at NightDragon we're not going to know it all. But what we want to do is create a platform of people, of partners, government, who can help us with these theses. So working closely with the government and the warfighter, you know what the threat is. You know what the risk could be. Working with partners like the Primes and the Global Primes, system integrators, you kind of know if they could sell it or deliver it. Working with your advisors like generals and admirals and CISOs, you know if they'd buy it. So if you get all that, you can come up with what the next threat risk problem is and that's what we hope to get.
John Furrier
>> I have to ask you this question because you're a historian as well as a leader in what you're doing now. In the old days, when you were running companies, you had a department, business development, you had salespeople, enterprise sales, oh, get the customer and there's a well-known process for that go-to-market. BizDev would build relationships with partners. Some Barney deals as they call them in the old school vernacular. But partnerships were pretty much let's do a business deal, maybe some technology transfer. It seems that with cloud that's changed. And now with the AI infrastructure and the role that it's impacting, accelerating, the role of being an ecosystem partner has changed. Could you share your vision on what's changed or what's not changed? Because it seems to me that there's a lot more co-designing going on, on a lot deeper conversations than simply papering, hey, we signed a deal, we're doing go-to-market together, we're doing a little licensing of technology, we'll integrate it on our side, maybe it's a little slower. What's the new form of partnering in this era?
Dave DeWalt
>> Ironically, there's almost a back to the future happening here, a full lifecycle that's occurred, because now in this AI era, you have a lot of Fortune 100, Fortune 500 type companies that are getting disrupted. So you end up with primes. You take a Lockheed or a Northrop or a large prime, suddenly all this autonomy comes along and access to procurement comes along and they have to change. So partnering became more important to them than ever as well. Or you take a Visa or a Mastercard who didn't worry so much about cybersecurity, they worried about it, but now they have more. They built their own stuff. Now they're buying companies and partnering in ways we've never seen. You look at the blockchain and all the Coinbase of the world. You start to see every era require partnering to be better because you don't want a catastrophic breach or threat to your environment. So it's come all the way around.
John Furrier
>> Yeah, it's a whole other world. And, again, the game is kind of still the same, but it's just a different fashion, I guess. Thanks for coming on theCUBE.
Dave DeWalt
>> I really appreciate it. Thanks for having me.
John Furrier
>> Dave DeWalt, he's an innovator but also leading the charge on defense tech. And this is the kind of stuff we want to unpack with this program. Figure out where it's going? what does it mean to us and again where the innovation is because safety and security are paramount in the ai era but it's affecting up and down the stack from the AI factories all the way to people on the streets and of course protecting our society thanks for watching
