YouSaid · the spoken record

Chris Krebs

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2022-05-26

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2022-05-26

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1. “Right. And then you've got down in Florida, you've got a Secretary of State also appointed by Governor DeSantis, who is a stop the stealer. You've got Arizona where if you recall that video of the live shot of Deucey getting a call from the president as he was signing the certification slate, there are really disconcerting, which is an incredible understatement signals out there that this thing is We're not on the right track, that there are some serious threats to democracy taking place right now, 22, not just 24, but right now that people need to wake up and we need to first ask ourselves that question, do we want to be a democracy? And if we do, then we need to start acting like it.”

   2022-05-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 491 — Chris Krebs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

2. “I think both can be true, but it's absolutely retribution. I mean, just step back and think about Raffensburger for a minute. I mean, just he had every incentive in the world to find the votes. He would be a Republican hero. He would probably be on a short list of 24 candidates had President Trump in the White House in 2020, continued through. But no, I mean, again, country over party. He did the right thing. And we are where we are. And he's being penalized for it. I think as you look downstream, downrange 2024, whether it's Trump running again or someone else, I think there are legitimate concerns right now about several states and the slate of electors that... Force everybody in the state to re-register to vote. He is responsible for appointing the Secretary of State. It's not any who administers elections.”

   2022-05-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 491 — Chris Krebs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

3. “That they wanted the Texas suit to move forward and go to the Supreme Court. And that's how that should have been the regular order of things, regularly commenting on the lack of any sort of malicious activity directed at the election.”

   2022-05-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 491 — Chris Krebs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

4. “Well, I think whether me personally or CISID broke the seal on, we had a good thing going for 20. And then by coming out and being a part of this speaking truth to power on what was happening out in the election land, I think there were some election officials that did not like that.”

   2022-05-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 491 — Chris Krebs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

5. “Well, so if you've seen a state in the way they conduct an election, you've seen one state and how they conduct the election. So every state's a little bit different. There are a number of states in the US that have independently elected. Secretaries of State. So they're political creatures and operatives amongst themselves. And then you have others that are either just senior career officials or their politicals that are appointed. But, you know, particularly in the run-up to 2020, and I'm not as close to the wheel today, but in 2020, we had strong relationships from really from either side of, and I'm not just talking Republicans, Democrats, but I'm talking like Republicans way out there and Democrats way out there. We had a working relationship because we all understood what was at stake and that was democracy.”

   2022-05-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 491 — Chris Krebs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

6. “I am significantly concerned, again, I think I understate this, but there's no accountability mechanism really for introducing, undermining confidence in an intellection into the conversation. It is just now part of the pitch that particularly on the GOP side in a number of these swing states that it's questionable. We don't know. We don't know what's going to happen. It's these machines. And let me just ask you.”

   2022-05-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 491 — Chris Krebs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

7. “Trump's candidate. Yeah, stump speech, and he's asked, is he going to, if he loses, is he going to accept the outcome? And he's like, well, depends on if there's fraud or not. So you're seeing it Republican on Republican political violence already. Yes.”

   2022-05-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 491 — Chris Krebs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

8. “Right. I mean, on the front end, though, right? You see this is historic turnout, the early voting numbers in Georgia. In Georgia specifically. So the participation piece is...”

   2022-05-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 491 — Chris Krebs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

9. “Well, and it goes beyond just, this is Jim Crow in a coat and tie or whatever it was. It was more question the legitimacy of the 22 election if because of some of the state laws that were proposed or passed if we didn't pass the voting rights act and the various pieces of legislation and HR one that were proposed, which was the kind of the large voting bill that the House had worked up, that again, the legitimacy of 22 would be in question. And I see this as a line you cannot cross. You cannot preemptively question the legitimacy of an election. That is just not a path to success here. Now, you've made the point about on the kind of the back end concerns. Yeah.”

   2022-05-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 491 — Chris Krebs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

10. “You have two candidates for governor in Pennsylvania and Arizona, Republican candidates that have promised to decertify the 2020 election, which is not a thing, by the way. Right, they can. But nonetheless.”

    2022-05-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 491 — Chris Krebs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

11. “President Trump's comment in the debate, his tweet about January 6th It Will Be Wild. There were all these different moments along the way that were changing the rules and establishing a permission structure where political violence was acceptable. And then through that, you then radicalize. And then you activate. In January 6th was that activation of the political violence in the streets taking place. And I remain convinced that that was not a one-off. That was the beginning of or a prelude to something much more concerning where we have a decentralized approach now. And you look at some of the elections that are taking place in statewide office in 22 for secretaries of state. And right now in Georgia, you have candidates for office that say they would not have certified the 2020 election.”

    2022-05-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 491 — Chris Krebs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

12. “She knew what was at stake. And I don't want to put words in her mouth necessarily, but I think she understands that what I was doing was important and what I did needed to be done. And so whatever the trade-offs to date that we've had were worth it and we do it again. But that's knowing what we know now and we'll every day we know now.”

    2022-05-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 491 — Chris Krebs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

13. “We had to leave the house for a couple days. We had to kind of get out of town for a little while. And it was unnerving where, you know, you can't have your kids play around in the front yard. But, you know, they died down. We worked through it. And we're more kind of confident and comfortable. But things pop up every day. There's always a little something that you kind of get your hair on end. These are not in the conversations you want to have with your kids, but you have to talk to them about maintaining situational awareness when you're outside and reintroducing the stranger danger concept.”

    2022-05-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 491 — Chris Krebs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

14. “I was getting them anyway. And then after I was on 60 Minutes, they really took off after a show, a right-wing show, you know, talked about me being a trader. And it really took off and a number of threads and I had to have a security guard with a gun in front of the house for a couple months.”

    2022-05-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 491 — Chris Krebs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

15. “Well, I was suddenly unemployed and brought a lot of attention my way and to the agency's way, which, you know, typically an agency like CISO only gets in the news for bad things, but it kind of Turn things over pretty significantly. And whether it's a media or just a public persona, thank God it was in the middle of COVID. So I could go out to the grocery store and not be harassed both positively and negatively because of wearing a mask and a hat. But it was pretty disruptive.”

    2022-05-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 491 — Chris Krebs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

16. “So, this story gets a little skewed, I think. So we have these things called coordinating councils. And the coordinating council for the election infrastructure subsector was made up of everyone under the sun in the election community, from the state and local officials to the vendors. Everybody comes together. It was their statement. It was not a CISA statement. It was the community's assessment of the practitioners of elections. They are the ones that developed the statement. They're the ones that said safe and secure election. They brought it to me, said, what do you think, boss? And I was like, hey, it's your statement. I happen to agree with it, but it's not mine to approve. They issued it. I amplied it. It gets attributed back to me. I don't think anybody regrets anything along the way. And everyone that I know still stands by that statement.”

    2022-05-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 491 — Chris Krebs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

17. “Yes. And these were all, and this is what the Sidney Powells of the world and Mike Lindell to this day still continues. My pillow guy. Yeah. And so these were the narratives and they just didn't stick politically. They were hard to describe that. Again, let's go back to the beginning in that unthinkable complexity. Technology is hard to describe, and particularly if it's being misappropriated and being able to describe how these threats or these activities happen. And so I've seen it as an A-B test. And, you know, trying testing different narratives, see which one works, see which one you want to promote. I still think 2020 in retrospect looks a lot like an A-B test where the foreign threats just didn't land. They didn't stick. They were too hard to describe and really stick. Instead, what worked domestic fraud?”

    2022-05-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 491 — Chris Krebs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

18. “It was even December or so of twenty twenty going into January. The majority of the disinformation was still about Dead Venezuelan dictators in Italian satellites and server farms in Germany that were raided by the CIA and defended by the US Army.”

    2022-05-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 491 — Chris Krebs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

19. “Your conference table there. So we were focused principally on foreign interference of Russia, Iran, and even China of interfering with the election, there was Russian activity, there was Iranian activity. I'll point you to October 20th, 21st, 22nd, 23rd, whatever it was, where they sent out a bunch of emails claiming to be the proud boys and it gets tracked back to the Iranians. That was a voter intimidation operation, just again, a disinformation operation. So we were really focused on identifying these things, getting information, on trusted information out to the American voter. And if you think back, the majority of the disinformation up until even”

    2022-05-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 491 — Chris Krebs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

20. “The same researcher, Kate Starboard, has been thinking through this similar analogy of spaghetti sauce. Some of the noodles will stick, some will fall off, but whatever you're left with is that stain on the wall. And that stain on the wall is the fraud. It's the implication that they're fraud something untoward happen. You can't really describe it. You can't really accurately convey it, but it happen and the stink, the stain remains. And that's where we are right now. None of these theories were single-handedly or individually intended to change the outcome or change the narrative or change the mindset. It was just undermining the broader understanding of what happened and have everyone lose focus and lose a grip of what the truth is.”

    2022-05-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 491 — Chris Krebs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

21. “And so it just, but the expectations were set. And so Kate Starbird, a researcher and professor at the University of Washington, coined this phrase of participatory disinformation, where there are three parties. The top is you have the elites and Trump is at the elite level. Then you have influencers, and that's like the Dinesh D'Souza types. And then you have the voting populace. And so the expectation of fraud was set by the elites in the summer, which primed the pump. for the masses to get out there and look for anything suspicious. You hear about suitcases and sharpies in Arizona and all these different theories that they were primed to see something funky. And then the influencers really start amplifying just like really boosting the messaging around the conspiracy theories.”

    2022-05-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 491 — Chris Krebs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

22. “So, look, I mean, you're hearing it still today from the former president. You heard it in 2016. Stop the steal was a phrase that was coined in 2016. They just reinvigorated it for 2020. But if you go back to June or so of 2020 and you start picking up the themes that mail-in voting is going to lead to fraud. And so the president would start pushing, the former president would start pushing these narratives. And then somebody in the political apparatus would be like, oh, well, not that kind of voting because remember the majority of Republican voters were a significant number of Republican voters in Florida vote. Yeah, man. Republicans in Florida.”

    2022-05-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 491 — Chris Krebs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

23. “Crisscrossing the country, hat in hand, meeting with election officials and really first trying to understand what their challenges were, what they were struggling with, but also reassuring them that, no, the worst words you want to hear from a bureaucrat if we're here to help. And we truly were. And I think we did provide support and help throughout the 2018 election and then even up into the 2020 election. It just took a while to break through the noise and make that connection where we could establish the trust.”

    2022-05-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 491 — Chris Krebs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

24. “Well, in 2018, before that, right? So as we came in, as I came in in March of 2017, this was just after Jay Johnson, Secretary Johnson, Homeland Security, had designated election infrastructure as critical infrastructure. And he knew what he was doing. I think ultimately he did the absolute right job. But much like almost everything else, the reaction, the immediate reaction was visceral. I got a significant amount of pushback from Republican secretaries of state that were saying, how dare you try to regulate and take over elections, Article 1, Section 4, which of course was never the intent. It was instead to provide them prioritized intelligence analysis and support and security services and things like that. So we spent a year and a half.”

    2022-05-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 491 — Chris Krebs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

25. “Line, and of course I'm sure I'll get pushback from others. But there was not a huge line at the door from the classical Republican. Political operatives that were willing to come in. So again, I saw an opportunity to serve, make a difference. I took it. And not a day went by where there wasn't some challenge that would kind of knock us off mission and course by a couple degrees and have to recalibrate.”

    2022-05-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 491 — Chris Krebs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

26. “In the political space. I've never really donated to any political campaigns. I think I donated once to Susan Collins, like 20 bucks back in 2006 or 2007. But beyond that, I've never participated in a campaign, never gone and canvassed or knocked doors or anything like that. And so I've tended to kind of always been an afterthought in the political conversations. Nonetheless, in the run-up to 2016 or rather the transition, is John Kelly gets announced as the DHS secretary? You know, I was like, look, I respect this man. My dad's side of the family has a history in the Marine Corps. And, you know, I knew enough about John Kelly to say, hey, I could work for him. And so the opportunity came to serve. And I'll be frank. There wasn't, you know, unlike I think probably this administration, there wasn't a”

    2022-05-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 491 — Chris Krebs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

27. “So maybe we forget these things, but in 2016, there was a pretty stark divide within the Republican Party of the Trumps, the Never Trumps. There wasn't a whole lot of in between. And while I have identified voted historically Republican, I'm not an active...”

    2022-05-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 491 — Chris Krebs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

28. “You sign something. Well, sheepishly, I come to her and say, I need to stay. And she got it. She understood. Sometimes I wonder if the wisdom of having five kids is one of those. But nonetheless, standing by me and supporting your duty.”

    2022-05-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 491 — Chris Krebs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

29. “And there's been a lot of pushback on Mark Esper, the Secretary of Defense, for his book, you know, some of the things he didn't say, some of the things he did. And I can relate to a good bit of that. We're national security professionals, and yes, there are moments when you need to speak out. And there are others where, at least from where you're sitting, when you're in the moment and you're working through the process and you're focused on the job where it's like, I just have to keep doing this mission. That was the biggest part that was the hardest part. You know, I had a great job at Microsoft, but I felt like I had an opportunity to serve, to make a difference, and given the opportunity, I should take it. And so I told my wife, you know, I'll do this for 12 months, maybe 18 months. And at the 18-month mark, I kind of sheepishly.”

    2022-05-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 491 — Chris Krebs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

30. “What are you thinking? Like, I was sitting in Arlington, Virginia, just sitting there watching this. I was like, what the hell is happening? And of course the next day there's an errata released, right? Oh, he left off a word. Yeah. He omitted a keyword of, you know, why he wouldn't do it or whatever. It was just, it was farcical. There were moments like that throughout my tenure and my time in the department of you really have to think through it's a constant kind of gain loss analysis in your head of can I continue to do this”

    2022-05-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 491 — Chris Krebs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

31. “Oh, absolutely. I was at Microsoft, and Microsoft saw a significant amount of the Russian activity, whether it was transiting Microsoft cloud services or mail accounts or things like that. And I had even at Microsoft had been targeted by Russians in the late 2016. So it was a no-brainer. Now, was it clear the extent to the activity? No. And I think that was when January of 2017 when the intelligence community assessment really laid out in very stark terms that there were three aspects to the Russian interference. The first was that targeting of election systems in the US. The second was the hack and leak campaign against the DNC and the Clinton campaign. And then the third was just this broader destabilizing disinformation campaign and trying to pit Americans at each other.”

    2022-05-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 491 — Chris Krebs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

32. “Yeah. So, and just kind of round this one out, I would not take any of this off the table just yet because I think the continued pressure on the Kremlin through sanctions, continued support via lethal aid to the Ukrainians and NATO expansion, including Finland and Sweden, is going to put economic and political pressure on Putin and the Kremlin and their decision calculus is going to continue to change as their avenues are closed off to them.”

    2022-05-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 491 — Chris Krebs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

33. “I think it's more likely that they have not within the Kremlin determined they need to cross that line yet because they know that it will invoke a response from the US and from the West. And they have a degree of despite what you may hear in congressional hearings where they're not afraid of us. I think they are afraid of us. I think that if we were to come at us pretty hard and direct invisibly, then we have a set of options.”

    2022-05-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 491 — Chris Krebs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

34. “That manifestation here, which is good news for the West, right? Good news for us. We've gone shields up as Jen Easterly, the new director of SISTA, is calling it, that this is not business as usual. Business executives need to be ready for anything and take security serious.”

    2022-05-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 491 — Chris Krebs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

35. “So that gets into the second piece, and there was always what is Russia going to do inside Ukraine? And then to your point, the second aspect was, okay, what are they going to do to the West? And I think the intelligence community and the administration was very concerned. And there was a market shift in their messaging right around March 23rd. In fact, President Biden actually went to the podium and said that there was an evolving intelligence, that there is something that the Russians may use against the West. And that was, as I understood it, because I had never seen anything like that. I hadn't seen President Trump. I hadn't really seen President Obama be that clear and stark. In fact, in that night, President Biden, I believe, went to the business roundtable and talked to all the major CEOs that were gathering in D.C. So there was a concern. There was a shift in intent from what I gather, but we still haven't necessarily seen.”

    2022-05-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 491 — Chris Krebs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

36. “They think what you'll find is that, well, they actually did do quite a bit of cyber operational activity on Ukraine. There were a number of what's known as Knockoff or brick, send offline some of the modems. So there was absolutely activity. But I think the lesson learned here probably is that when you have a full-blown kinetic war, when bombs are dropping, missiles are flying, guns are going off, the kinetic piece overshadows any of the digital piece.”

    2022-05-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 491 — Chris Krebs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

37. “I think so, and I think just stepping back for a little bit, myself included a number of us thought that there would be a more visible cyber component to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.”

    2022-05-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 491 — Chris Krebs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

38. “The cryptocurrency economy that's outside of the traditional fiat regulatory oversight. And the third is make Russia actually take care of the criminality that's occurring within its own borders. And if they don't do that, then we have to impose some sort of cost on them and whether that's the military and cyber command going after the criminal, the gangs or taking their assets away as it transits whatever non-Russian wallets or exchanges, you have to make it so it hurts to do this and it's not profitable anymore.”

    2022-05-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 491 — Chris Krebs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

39. “You know, if this was a missile, the US military would respond or would take that missile out. But instead, we just continued to let it happen. And then the third piece, which is, I think, increasingly relevant right now is that cybercrime brings money home. It is a great way to bring in Western cash into Russia absent any sort of relevant economy or industry. That just brings cash in, but it also is going to continue to drive participation in that ransomware economy because you look across the street and you see Vlad across the street with a maserati and you want one too or you want an Aston Martin or something like that. So you're going to get into that game. And until we break the chain, any of those three aspects of making ourselves harder targets and more secure here, the second is we have to figure out how to get a better grip on.”

    2022-05-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 491 — Chris Krebs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

40. “So, I see three at least three possible objectives that the Russians would get out of a vibrant cyber crime organization or set of organizations that are attacking the West. First is that it actually builds almost a strategic cyber reserve force that they may be able to call on down the road. So it's on the job training. It's constant targeting and understanding of the vulnerabilities of the West. And it doesn't require a whole lot of curation. It's just go do your thing and go harry them, which leads to the second point of it actually aligns with the strategic objectives of the Kremlin, and that is to destabilize the West, to constantly destabilize the West and the confidence that the American people, that the Western citizens have in their government's ability to protect them. And that continues to be a refrain we hear from businesses.”

    2022-05-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 491 — Chris Krebs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

41. “The point where some of the ransomware, the malware that's actually deployed into target or victim systems does a check? And what does it check for? It checks for Russian language packages on the Windows system. And if it finds a Cyrillic language or Russian language package installed on the machine, it says, nope, we don't want any of that. Exits the process and moves on.”

    2022-05-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 491 — Chris Krebs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

42. “Or misconfigured system or some stupid human trick where an employee clicks on an email and provides credentials or a password or something like that. And really that's been, I think, as I've said it, made up of three things. Ransomware is just the fact that the systems we use are still a little too hard to secure and a little too easy to exploit. Cryptocurrency, and this is where the crypto bros get all upset with me. But cryptocurrency really has facilitated the extraction of value and wealth from the West. And then the third piece is Russia. Russia has given a safe haven to a number of these cyber criminals to operate with impunity just as long as you don't hack Russian or Commonwealth of Independent State countries.”

    2022-05-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 491 — Chris Krebs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

43. “Regulations that require cybersecurity expertise on publicly traded boards. I mean, to think where we've come in the last 10 years. Now, everyone wishes that we were doing more, that we were moving faster. But the fact remains that businesses are, what is their first principle or their mission? They're there to make money and sometimes security is seen as a cost center and friction. So we're doing better. We can do more. And as I've already mentioned, the challenge we will always have is that there is an intelligent adversary on the other side that is always poking holes, that is looking for us to make a misstep, or somehow they can exploit and extract what they want. And that's really, as I see it at least, ransomware is just a manifestation of a bad guy that's figured out how to monetize a vulnerable.”

    2022-05-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 491 — Chris Krebs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

44. “The way that I think about this is that the technology challenges we have, it is not a static environment, meaning that any progress we make is going to be matched by someone that's seeking to take advantage of us get to our money, get to the things we care about, including our intellectual property. But any way you cut it, sitting where we are in 2022 and looking back to 2012, which I think is when it really was becoming clear on a national stage, we have absolutely made progress. I mean, there is a vibrant cybersecurity ecosystem. There are national conversations. There are congressional hearings on the regular. We are harder targets as a result. We have absolutely made progress. I have board briefings on a monthly basis with all sorts of companies. The securities and exchange commission is proposed.”

    2022-05-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 491 — Chris Krebs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

45. “Words and narratives that the policy makers can understand. And that was always one of my top priorities when I was in the last administration was communicating with the Hill, communicating with the media, communicating with stakeholders in simple terms that effectively at a fifth grade reading level of what we're trying to accomplish, why it's important, and what we need to do.”

    2022-05-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 491 — Chris Krebs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

46. “I've always felt that in part I am where I am because I'm a middle child. And I'm always thinking compromise. I'm always bringing people together, try to get to the bottom of issues. Cybersecurity is a complex technical field. There's a book in the mid-1980s called Neuromancer. And it was the William Gibson first coined the term cyberspace. But there's another line in this book about the unthinkable complexity of cyberspace and the technologies we use. And the challenge that I've always seen is that the technical side, the true technical experts, which I am not a technical expert, but the true technical experts, when you're talking to the people that are actually making the policy decisions and the national level strategic decisions when they don't have that technical understanding, you've got to have a Rosetta stone. And so I saw an opportunity of being able to play that gap, translating comprehensive.”

    2022-05-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 491 — Chris Krebs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

47. “Whether it was through just being in the right place at the right time or knowing where the puck was going to go ended up being on a number of these different initiatives, including helping the administration and helping the Obama administration and helping NIST, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, develop the NIST cybersecurity framework. And this was 2013-14. Let me just.”

    2022-05-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 491 — Chris Krebs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

48. “Stolen intellectual property and then supplanting U.S. and Western companies out of the market. And there were a number of different initiatives happening. And I just happen, you know,”

    2022-05-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 491 — Chris Krebs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

49. “Program. That's when you started seeing the budgets tick up. That's when you started seeing the national strategy attention at the very beginning of the Obama administration, where you had a number of different experts come in and kind of assess where we were and issue strategies and you had Howard Schmidt come in. You had all these luminaries in the cybersecurity field come in and try to set, okay, this is the new game plan. And over the next several years as it became clear that China was eating our lunch, stealing intellectual property. And then President Obama sat down with President Xi and they had their kind of moment of, you know, this is what's not going to happen anymore. You are not going to take our intellectual property and then turn it over to your national champions for monetization, which is what they had done for years and years, just commercial.”

    2022-05-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 491 — Chris Krebs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

50. “Pieces of DHS that didn't fit into Coast Guard or TSA or CBP. And so it's just kind of a loose aggregation. And the big piece was infrastructure protection. And then there was a little piece of cybersecurity that had come over partly from the government services administration, which was the emergency response part for cyber. And then there was a communications piece that came down from the NSA. But it was quite small. But it was still at that point clear to me at least, and I think many of us, that the digital risk, that cybersecurity threats were going to be a significant part of any sort of national resilience approach. And at the end of the Bush administration, there was a comprehensive national cybersecurity initiative that was launched by the NSA and DHS that started deploying tools across civilian networks. It was called the Einstein.”

    2022-05-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 491 — Chris Krebs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source