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Cyber Security Today Profile Series: Dr. Priscilla Johnson on Environmental Engineering, Water Strategy, and Cyber Intelligence
00:54:14
In this episode, host Jim Love kicks off his new profile series with a deep dive into the compelling career of Dr. Priscilla Johnson, an environmental advocate at the crossroads of technology and sustainability. Dr. Johnson discusses her work in...
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- [00:01]
Jim Love
One of the great things about hosting a program like this is that you get to meet a lot of interesting people. And normally I'm doing that in terms of an event or a news story, but I thought, what if I just did a profile on the people I thought were really interesting? And it turns out I've got a couple of these to try out. I confess I've been working on this idea for almost a year and. And I have two of these to try out with. The first is Dr. Priscilla Johnson. I met her, hoping to talk to her about infrastructure, particularly drinking water and cybersecurity. I met a fascinating person with an incredible career. So stay till the end and you can hear a few of the clips that I would have taken out a few minutes of for infrastructure or do what I did and listen to the incredible stories she shared with me. We pick up when she's talking about building a data center in Africa in the middle of a huge drought. Now you'll probably know that data centers take a lot of water. And how do you pull water especially enough to run a data center out of thin air? That's where we started.
- [01:17]
Dr. Priscilla Johnson
My name is Dr. Priscilla Johnson. I could be introduced as someone who is Earth advocate, who lives in the space between advancing technology and protecting the planet.
- [01:29]
Jim Love
You've got a unique background and I want to talk to you about that. You worked on a data center in South Africa. You were the Director of Water Strategy for Microsoft at that time. You just finished a master's at Purdue University in Environmental engineering. Do I have that right?
- [01:44]
Dr. Priscilla Johnson
So not quite. So I'll start with the education piece. I have a master's and PhD from Purdue, which I got some time ago. What I'm finishing is a graduate certificate in cyber intelligence from James Madison University, focuses on the intelligence piece of the cyber war.
- [02:04]
Jim Love
But you were at the time, you were also a director of water strategy at Microsoft, right?
- [02:11]
Dr. Priscilla Johnson
Yes, I was director of Water Strategy for Microsoft a few years ago. I was over all of their global data centers. So it wasn't just South Africa. That was a very small one, but it had a very big impact because it was the first for Microsoft on the continent and it launched their Africa hyperscale.
- [02:33]
Jim Love
Being an environmentalist and dealing with data centers, they use a lot of power, they use a lot of water and I was fascinated by this. You were in the middle of a three year drought, you're working for a company and you have to open a data set. Well, how did you do that?
- [02:48]
Dr. Priscilla Johnson
I'll start by saying that I'm an empath and I'm an intuitor. I'm very strongly attuned to things that can be seen and can't be seen. When I came on board, it was in October of 2017, and let's just say the disaster, quote, unquote, day zero, that whole term did not come onto the world scene until January of 2008. So that's just a few months later. That was by the New York Times. They had covered that story. And in doing so, it was a series of events that got me to asking questions, which is the thing I do most naturally. I have a background in communications from nyu. That's my bachelor's degree. So I'm used to asking a lot of questions and being very curious about things. So I started asking, of course, when I came on board to Microsoft, questions about where are these data centers? Are they in populated areas? Are they out in the middle of rural America or rural anywhere? And if so, why are they extracting so many natural resources, and what can we do to offset that? So that was my frame and my reference. And then when I heard about what was going on in South Africa, the things that I heard were the following. And how I heard them was also important. So I had a colleague at the time at Microsoft who came by my office, I'll never forget. He stopped by and said, hey, I'm on my way to South Africa as an Aspen fellow. So it wasn't in his capacity as working on the data centers. He said, is there anything you want me to find out from them since I'm going there? And I was like, sure. I said, just let me know. What is it that they need? What is. Is it that they are working on that they are having stumbling blocks on? Because that's a natural question to ask if you're a director at a. At a place like Microsoft. So he comes back and it's probably about two weeks later, and he sits in my office again and says, you'll never guess what's going on. And I said, what's happening? He says, there's chaos. He said, there's no water. And I said, what do you mean there's no water? He says, they are in the middle of a. You don't know if you're in the middle of a drought. But they said, there's a drought going on and people are really suffering. They're quitting their jobs, they're having to stand in line for water. They're trucking water in, as far as they knew, from farmers and the Western part of the cape. And I said, really? And then I said, there's a data center that they're building. This doesn't, this is not adding up.
- [05:27]
Jim Love
Why are we, yeah, and you, and you don't need a degree in communications to know that you're going to get some bad press at this point.
- [05:33]
Dr. Priscilla Johnson
It's wasn't, I really wasn't thinking about the press. I was thinking about what decisions were being made at the time. Because I do know that with, depending upon who is running things, who's running the show, people can use money to get things done and not get things done in the most responsible way. And it was my charge at that time. So there was a responsibility that I had to make sure that things were mobilized to address what was this pending drought. And so that's when I switched on the light, figuratively in my brain and literally for everyone else and started mobilizing this team that was going to be addressing it and what complicated it was that the data center was under construction and it had a lot of delays at the time and it was sold out and customers were waiting. And the question was, what am I going to do about it?
- [06:32]
Jim Love
And what'd you do?
- [06:35]
Dr. Priscilla Johnson
So what I did was since I'm a systems thinker and a person who is, I guess you could say I, I have a tendency to really think empathically about people and their plight. I said, you know what? And people say this all the time about companies like Microsoft. We have an embarrassment of riches after we solve the problem in the four walls of our data center. What are we going to do about helping people? And to my not really surprise, but amazement, Microsoft has an entire arm called Microsoft Philanthropy. And I literally scoured the campus. I ran around Redmond's campus and for those who don't know where Redmond is, that's just outside of Seattle, across the bridge, 5:20 across Lake Washington. And I was literally knocking on people's doors. They didn't know me, I didn't know them. If they had anything to do with Microsoft Philanthropy, I was basically chasing them down, asking them questions, how do we help? How does this work? I was talking to a very helpful person from Disaster Response. Microsoft has this whole disaster response unit that anywhere in the world that there's a disaster that you hear about hurricanes, earthquakes or otherwise, they send teams in right after or they mobilize them ahead of time to make sure that their IT infrastructure is resilient and is back up and running. And between the 30 person team that I had mobilized for the Engineering piece of what are we going to do? And that came later by the way. I wanted to find out what is it that we could do outside the four walls. And so I reached out to my own personal contacts who live in South Africa, who are from there about what agencies would be best to work with in terms of capacity. The people that could interact with a company like Microsoft receive funds from a company like Microsoft to assist them to build more resilient infrastructure. So it we landed on the Western Cape Health Services and what the Western Cape Health Services is it's a 52 hospital entity in the Western Cape of South Africa that serves about 7 million people. And they had the resources, they had the facility managers there, et cetera to help with managing what we collectively came up with would be what would help them the most to withstand a future drought that is a shortly coming. And that was the installation of smart water meters. And those smart water meters came along with a backpack of a technology built by Itron and they are one of the leading companies that make utility meters in general. They wrapped around a software solution to help them with leak detection and also to train their facility managers on the alert response and how to use the software itself for them to track any type of remedial action that they would need to take for any leaks that they discovered. That component was really important for me to put that in place. The community response was also really important for me. Continue working over think January 2018 all the way until actually when the actual data center launched which was later in 2019. What I wanted to make sure of was that we were not taking drinking water from people. In my opinion data centers should not be run on potable water. I'll just put that out there. But if they are, if they are, there needs to be a very responsible reuse strategy in place and there's a lot of ways to get to that. But Cape Town was a very specific problem. There was a very specific problem. There is a reservoir and I'm going to have to pause to make sure I say it. I believe it's called the Watersklooth and it was designed for 2 million people. But then the entire Cape Town area, the greater Cape Town area grew to almost 8 million people. So here they were relying on this one of this main reservoir which comprises almost 60% of the water that they actually serve to the Capetonians. And then there's also other smaller reservoirs but all of those were dry and then it was the main reservoir that was going dry that they had to shut off. And they declared they would shut off on April 12, 2018. And that's because it would have reached deadpool and they would just had to shut them the pumps off and then again desalinization. Any other alternative. I did not want to explore any of the alternatives that would take away drinking water from people, period. So fast forward to August of 2018. Meanwhile the stater center is still being built so we're still not online. But there is a big problem because there's a compliance issue at hand. What the Western Cape government had said was that 45% were reduction across the board for commercial entities like Microsoft had to be put in place. But what did that mean for Microsoft? We had not come online. So 45% of what? Of zero. So there we have another conundrum. So in August of 2018 August is the month for Stockholm World Water Week where all the folks around the world gather to talk and think about about water very seriously. I was approached because I, I guess people, they know that you're coming to the conference because it's announced and people knew I was coming. I was coming from Microsoft direct water strategy and there was no other real equivalent in the other tech center tech companies and a lot of people wanted my time. But there was this one group that stood out to me, it was called the Young Water Professionals Group YWP and they approached me, they found me somehow in the conference, knew it was me. They came up to me and said Dr. Johnson, can we get some of your time? Could you please come and look at some of the Young Water Professionals and what they're displaying. They had an event going on and I said you know what, my calendar is full but I will absolutely give you my time if I have break in my schedule. And sure enough I had a break in my schedule. I found them and I said hey, I'm here, I can't make your event but maybe I could talk to someone. And then I told them, I said listen, this is the problem I'm trying to solve and it's very specific problem. I don't know if you have anyone in your portfolio of young water professionals, but I sure would like to talk to someone. And I explained the situation, just I'm talking now. And they said and then they pause and turned around and sure enough there was someone walking by at the same time that I was asking that question. And she asked her to come over. Her name was Beth Koigi. And we started talking. She said she had this solution in place that basically just took ambient air and converted it into with through a fancy dehumidifier, drinking water, or at least potable water. Right. And water that you could use for various purposes. And I said, well, I don't know. Okay, that sounds like something I'd like to explore. Can it be used on a large scale? That's really what was my biggest question. How big can this be scaled up? Sounds great at the bench level, but can you scale this up? And we need a lot of water. And over the course of the next three nights, I was on the phone with them working through that technology and knowing that there's a technical review process that we have back at Microsoft that I'd gone through a couple times at that point, more than a couple. And I was able to give them a guideline on this is what we're looking for. And so the questions that I was asking them allowed them to either beef up their presentation or make more of a directed play at providing more data. Whether it was energy or maintenance, anything like that had to do with operating costs, but most importantly on delivering the result that we needed, which was the water. And how can you predict how much water you, you're going to actually get from a device like that? And so they went through the calculations of how that happens. It really has to do with humidity. Right. I said, okay. At the end of those three nights, I said, you know what, I'm going to take this back to Redmond, I'm going to present it to my team and we will go from there. But I think this is in really good shape now. This was a opinion based company, it was a startup owned by three women called Magic Water. And they were very responsive to any of the questions that I had, any changes that needed to be made in terms of what to present. The CTO was just fantastic. And when I say fantastic, I mean they had the sense of urgency that I had that because this was weighing on me. And I really came there that week to solve that problem because I knew that these, this was the world's best showing up in Stockholm once a year. And we took, within four months we were able to take the construction and the technology and integrate it into that data center so that we were off grid. We're the first that I know of off grid data center in the world for water. And then the other question became, what about energy? Because it does require more energy than was planned for. So we potentially planned to have a distributed generation, their solar on site to offset that. So those plans were put in place. It wasn't something that we could put on the table right away just because we were just trying to get the data center open. And we had a phenomenal opening. It was, it was nothing like I thought I would experience. We had the former premier of the Western Cape come to our ribbon cutting, Helen Zilla, and she was amazed. She was very grateful and thankful that in the time of one of the worst droughts that South Africa had experienced over this course of what had been been three years, no water. And we were able to deliver the first hyperscale data center on the continent in her territory. And it did not take drinking water from the residents. And so that's what I mean by my work being the nexus between advancing technology and respecting the limits of what we have in the environment or what we don't have. There's a way to do things that aren't necessarily the most expensive way. There's a way to do things that aren't necessarily the most elaborate things. Simplicity is so beautiful. If you look at da Vinci's drawings, they were just some of the most oddly simple things like why didn't we think of this kind of thing? That's the kind of person that, that I always wanted to be is thinking very simply, taking the beauty and the simplicity of engineering and leveraging it for advancing technology and protecting the environment.
- [18:55]
Jim Love
Wow. Yeah. I, I've been teaching engineers for a long time. There aren't. There was not an abundance of high power women in engineering. What drew you into this field in the first place?
- [19:12]
Dr. Priscilla Johnson
Oh boy. I know now that I'm in exactly the right place I should be because. And I want to say this out of a lot of respect for the industry that I thought I was going to be in and that industry. If I told you at the beginning I was in communications, nyu. I had internships in the music industry and film. And I didn't think that world was for me, it was New York City. And I told you I'm an empath, I'm an intuitor. And I just said this doesn't feel right. I don't want to be in this industry or anywhere near it. So I left it and I had some soul searching to do. This was my senior year at nyu and at the time it was one of the most expensive schools in the country, probably still is. And God bless my parents, they, they stuck with me the whole time. And my sister was at Columbia at the same time. So for me to come out and say I want to change my major, the way that I decided on it was first I said, okay, this isn't for me. And then the second thing that I decided to do was do what I do best, which is research stuff. And this is back when we had the card catalog system. And. Yeah, I remember. And it was back when we had that. And I queued up. I'll never forget, outside of vopes library, that's NYU's main library, right on Washington Square. And I would be out there before it opened. It was either six or seven in the morning that opened, or I can't remember, it was really early in the morning, and I lived on the Upper east side, so I had to jump on the train and go all the way down the nyu. And I had my backpack and I had questions. So I showed up thinking to myself, I've got to find something that will get me out of bed every single day. Now, I had a little kernel in my head because I had taken this class called Limits of the Earth, taught by Joseph Mallet in the Brown building. I will never forget. I will never forget him. I will never forget the building. I'll never forget the class. And we read something called State of the World. And State of the World is a publication that comes out. I think it still comes out every year. And it talks about the state of our planet from an environmental perspective. And I was aghast. I could not believe that these things were happening to our planet. Like, how could. How are we living our lives? Nothing's going on. Or so I thought. I was young, and it shocked me. But then at the same time, that was just one class I was taking. There were all of these other classes I was finishing. But that was in my mind as I went into BoP's library and started digging through the car catalog and starting to really question, where should I land? So I decided the environment gets me out of bed every day. That's. That was the question that I asked myself. And as a matter of fact, when I mentor people, I asked them that question, do you know what will get you out of bed every day? So that's number one. Number two, what about the environment? And I said, if I want to do higher education, I need to get the highest degree, which is the PhD. So that was settled. I was like, okay, environment. PhD. Okay, science versus engineering. Environmental science versus environmental engineering. I think I could do more on the engineering side because you decide on the design of systems and how they directly impact the planet. So I said, I chose a PhD in environmental engineering. And then this was the best part. I started writing letters, yes, writing letters to professors around the country who were at the top universities that had environmental engineering programs. And I will never forget the response that I had gotten. But my favorite response, first of all, it was very positive from those who answered me, but Dr. Leonardo Ortolano, and I will say his name, I've never met him. He was at Stanford at the time. He mailed me a letter back. I still have this letter. And he said to me, here's what you do if you want to make this transition. You take this class. I already had a background in higher science and math because I went to a science and math tech high school. I'd placed out of all the science and math classes, so I didn't really have to take anything in undergraduate, but I still did. And he said, you take these classes, put them on your transcript, and then you just apply and you tell him your story. And I did.
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Jim Love
Wow. Come out of this engineering degree. You've worked at Microsoft, you've done, I think, some incredible stuff. What happened after that? Where'd you go after that?
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Dr. Priscilla Johnson
So after the degree?
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Jim Love
Yeah.
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Dr. Priscilla Johnson
Or after Microsoft?
- [24:27]
Jim Love
Oh, after both.
- [24:28]
Dr. Priscilla Johnson
Okay. So after the degree, I went to a very improbable place. I went to Texas, which I ended up loving. I remember now. I was. I consider myself a New Yorker. And I ended up going to a place where New Yorkers have an impression of Texas. And when I got there, I found the most incredible, incredible people. I love Texans and I love Texas. My experience there, it's very positive. And I ended up working for Dow Chemicals. And Dow Chemicals known for a lot of things. They're known as the number one maker of plastics in the world. They are known for purchasing Union Carbide after Bhopal, after that incident. They are known for impacting American history in a way that others don't really know and think. And they were commissioned at least two times in a major way by the US Government to participate in wartime activities including manufacturing aluminum for planes. And they were also. And they had transformed this entire plant in Freeport, Texas, to do that. And their headquarters that started in 1897, they had built in Midland, Michigan. They manufactured Agent Orange there.
- [26:02]
Jim Love
As soon as I remember.
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Dr. Priscilla Johnson
Yeah. So the Agent Orange that was manufactured there amongst a whole other host of chemicals and its byproducts, decades later in the form of persistent organic pollutants, are still there. It's 40 miles of river. The plant is located directly on the Tittabawassee River. And if you look at a map, it's a V shape. So the Tittabwassee River Flows from north to south and then there's a conjunction, it's like a V at the bottom and then it turns up going from south to north into the Saginaw river which goes into the Saginaw Bay. Since 1897 pre EPA pre1971 72 there were no environmental controls along the river. There was a lot of thermal pollution. You can imagine it was just the entire environment was stripped. And then the EPA comes along and then decades later there are now cancers and neurological diseases and fish advisories. And people are starting to discover in and through particular public health consultation that was ordered and conducted that there were some problems, there were some contamination problems. They needed to be investigated, they needed to be ultimately remediated. So after my stint in Freeport, which lasted two years and I was there just learning the ropes, I was on the environmental sustainable development team of course. Why, where else would I be? I helped develop their at the time, their 2015 sustainability goals and just learned about the industry itself. Did a lot of project management there, designing like a freshwater recycle system for the entire plant and then moved up to Midland. And that is where I learned about myself. And I say that because I was still very like open eyed and naive to really what people's intentions were. Because I'm an engineer and I think take things at face value while I'm an intuitor and empath, I don't think that people are intentionally doing harm. But I found out differently and I want to say I met some amazing people at Dow Chemical and some of whom I'm still in contact with. So not to cast any dispersions, but the experience that I had there was very rich. It was a super learning experience. But it became something that I never thought I would be in the middle of. So I went on maternity leave and I was just doing my job and kind of letting everybody know. As a project manager there, I was part of this, what's called the Michigan Dioxin Initiative. It was to address the legacy contamination that was there. I was brought up as a project manager, brought up from Freeport that is. And I was assigned to this company of an elite team. It was only five people on the team, five corn people. And we were there to address this issue. The dioxins, the. Some of the most hazardous compounds are, were, were they were present in the environment. TCD 2378 TCD. And there were other contaminants that the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality, as it was called at the time, it's called Eagle now they wanted to know what other contaminants were in the environment. So this was part of all of the, part of my job. I started as a GIS expert there and just, basically just kept up with all the mapping where all the contamination was when we were doing a sampling, where the hotspots were, making sure these things were reported out and these quarterly reports that had to go into the region 5. And at the time it was pretty contentious because there were lawsuits and there were, there were multiple lawsuits. And then there was a pending class action lawsuit for DOW to clean up everything that was there. And, and I just sat right in the middle of it. I was there just doing my job. And then I went on maternity leave and I came back and the very first phone call I gotten back when I was at my desk was from a. It was from a data validator who was an expert in all the EPA methodologies to actually even detect some of the chemicals that we've been talking about. And so I had very high level of confidence in what they were doing. They worked for federal government. Their entire organization had government contracts to do this. And she said, and my name at the time was, was Denny. And she said, Dr. Denny, they won't give me the data. I said, what do you mean they won't give you the data? And she said, said, I can't get the data. And I said, what do you mean? And she said, they want me have it. I said, but I already, before I went to return, I. I told everybody what they had to do. You need to get the data to her and make sure that it's validated so we can turn it into the EPA and blah. And so I ended up saying, okay, let me find out what's going on the phone up. And mind you, this is my first call back from maternity after six weeks. And I asked my manager, and my manager said, stay out of it. And I was completely confused because just six weeks ago I had this job, but now I have to stay out of my shop. I just, Nobody was explaining to me what was going on. But what I also found out was that they thought I was coming back after three months and not six weeks. So I probed a little bit further. I called her back the data validator night. I said, what's happening? And she says, the laboratory, none of their machines are calibrated. There's nothing up to date in terms of their. And I'm getting really technical here. They're NCLs. There's a, there's an NCL study that's be done for all the equipment. It's called maximal controllable limits for the machines that actually detect these contaminants. And you technically cannot turn in data that are analyzed on machines that are not in compliance with this. And I was finding out all of these things and I said okay. My manager said to stay out of it. I was finding out that the data were being handled improperly. And these were thousands of samples. These weren't just a couple of samples. And they were. They had to go before the federal government. And not only that they were and potentially going to be used in legal action and litigation. We had a responsibility to make sure that those data were right. I did. And so after having discovered that, my manager said stay out of it. And then discovering more discrepancies, I contacted his manager. Because that's what you do. Right. So I went to him and I said this is what's going on. I said we've got to. We need to address this. Why can't we just. Let's do the correct thing here. And that's when my hell began.
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Jim Love
Wow.
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Dr. Priscilla Johnson
And so you wanted to know what I did after. After school and after. And I still have not changed as a person and as a professional and how I would respond.
- [34:00]
Jim Love
Yeah, I can appreciate that. But I think there's a reason why perfectly. I wouldn't say people that we would normally assume have a strong moral compass seem to be able to lose that or forget about it in a corporate setting. I think that. I think that's the kindest way to say it is. And they can be very good people. They could be pillars of their community but are somehow check that out when they get to work. And at times people confront that and it's tough in terms of your career and where you go. But you've obviously been survived all this, done well and you're now moving into cyber security from all of this. Yeah, I. I just. I want to back up just and ask you a little bit about before we get to the cyber security. You've. You did a lot in what I'd call civil engineering. And I think that. Not what I'd call civil. I think what everybody would call civil engineering. But the. So you've done a lot there and how do you bridge from there to cybersecurity.
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Dr. Priscilla Johnson
Did not happen overnight. This kind of revelation. There's key moments in your life when things happen and you're called right or something calls you want to put it. And I was on my treadmill. I'll never forget this. I was watching a documentary, and the documentary was on white nationalist here in the United States. And I grew up with my share of that growing up in the south and the Confederate flags and all the hate. And so it was part of my growing up. And then I was hearing about how these white nationalists were organizing to poison our water systems. That's not fake. Wait a minute. You do enough damage and now you want to poison our waters?
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Jim Love
So got the flags, you got the torches, the water.
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Dr. Priscilla Johnson
So I was absolutely incensed. I'm incensed about a lot of things that aren't right. But this just took the cake. Black in the United States is a challenge. Being a black professional is a challenge. But my calling, it serves everyone, including those white nationalists. If they want clean drinking water, okay, I'll show up at a water treatment plant or a wastewater treatment plant. If it's a reclamation district, I'll be involved in water efficiency efforts, energy efficiency efforts, like I was at PG&E in California. I will do what I can for the environment because I know that's why I'm here. But that just galled me. And so I started thinking, and it takes a little time sometimes for me to synthesize everything because I'm usually busy and dive deep in whatever I'm working on at the time. And I said, okay, I'm looking back over this career. I've been in chemicals and the chemical industry. Major challenge there. I've been in water and wastewater. I've been in energy, that point data centers. All these critical infrastructure pieces that everyone is telling, particularly the FBI here in the United States, are telling everyone that these systems are under attack. What can I do that makes sense for this next step in my career? And then I was introduced, and I'm so grateful as introduced to one of the leading experts in DDoS and distributed denial of service attacks, Dr. Edna Reed. She was an adjunct professor at James Madison University till recently. And my professor, I was introduced to her by one of her mentors from the FBI. And he was our nation's first counterterrorism Chief at the FBI following 9 11. And he's a very good friend of mine, and I trust him. And he said, you really need to talk to her. And she told me about her program. It's a graduate certificate in cyber intelligence. And I started thinking, I said, I don't necessarily want to be in cybersecurity. I have a background in IT from my graduate school years, but I didn't necessarily want to do that type of work. But the intelligence piece is fascinating. Because you're talking about using analytical methods to find out the who, the when and the tactics, the techniques, the procedures of these cyber threat actors and how they would compromise our critical infrastructure. So that is how I got into this space. Space. And over the course of the last two to three years in talking with her, I entered the program and now I'm about to finish the program in December. And it has enlightened me in ways that I'm, I feel more empowered to be of assistance in that fight. Now. Yes, it goes back to me watching that documentary with a white nationalist, but I learned then it's beyond that. It's the nation state actors that are using cyber in a ways can cripple us just from delivering hospital services, making sure patients are getting the right food, all the way down to that, and then all the way to just this mass scale chaos. And that's really, I think, what most countries, most cyber threat actors want to impose is that chaos and that fear apart from if they're in the ransomware business, they want money.
- [40:10]
Jim Love
Yeah, and I think you're absolutely right. I don't hear enough of it on from regular media sources. But, and I'm not, I'm just a person who studies data. The potential for terrorism, or whatever you want to call it from that is within North America or the US and Canada is, I think is totally underestimated. The nation states that are attacking us, that get a lot of press and we do a lot of that. But I think the third thing that is totally underestimated is the degree to which our civil infrastructure, first of all can't hold up to attacks, whether they be from internal or external threats. The second thing is I don't think anybody realizes how much of our civil infrastructure has probably already been compromised. Did you in your studies, you must have been talking to some of the sharper people in the industry. Is that perception held by people who are working in cybersecurity or at least teaching it these days. Do people realize the depth to which we are vulnerable?
- [41:15]
Dr. Priscilla Johnson
It's a great question. For one, my mentor, my professor definitely does. She's former FBI, CIA, so she has a very healthy appreciation for that. But in general, I don't know. If people haven't been really impacted by something, then the threat is just one of the other threats out there. Right? Like the potential for getting in your car and having an accident and that type of thing. It goes in with that. But this is different though, and I think it's a threat and a fear that people have not Faced. They don't know what it's like, at least here in the United States and other places around the world. Absolutely. They know what it's like to have their infrastructure in a day be destroyed and decimated. They certainly know that we have so much privilege of not having to know that. Depending upon who you ask and where you ask them and where they lived and what their experiences have been, I don't think there's going to be that sense of alarm. But I think what a lot of the agencies I'm seeing are trying to do, and they've done for quite some time, but for different reasons, is to prepare people for when it happens. And I know living in the Bay Area, I've lived for 12 years in San Francisco Bay, the threat of earthquakes is very real. And I became part of an emergency response team at work on my job site and learned how to prepare for an earthquake at any moment. Always have something in your car. Always have something at your house. Always have something in your office. And the magic number was at the time when I left, three. Three weeks. Have something for three weeks because the first responders will not be able to get to you. There's not enough of them. So the preparedness piece, though, is there's definitely a. What you would consider. Some people call them fringe, the doomsday preppers, or however you want to characterize them. But these folks, they have the right mentality because you do want to be prepared for when something happens and the first responders can't get to you. But, and it's ironic, you need to have water. You need to have plenty of water.
- [43:46]
Jim Love
I think it is different. I'm old enough to remember Y2K and friends of mine buying generators and they're stocking up on food and all this stuff. And I said, don't be ridiculous. I lived in Toronto, Canada, at the time. We're a major city. There was no way that city could do without power for more than two days. Somebody will do something about it. And I knew people working in infrastructure and hydro and things like that, and I knew that people were actively working on this. I had a great faith in their ability to handle that. Even the whole Eastern seaboard went down in my lifetime. People came back up. We recovered. I'm not a survivalist by any stretch of the imagination, but I have a generator and food, because I. I don't believe now. I believe that the infrastructure we have is so old and so brittle that it could be taken out by anybody. And I think we only have to look at what people, what hackers have done to healthcare to see how quickly they can close down an essential part of our infrastructure. And I think that's, I don't think I'm. No, I wouldn't, I would have dismissed survivalists at any one point. But I'm now convinced that there will be a major infrastructure failing.
- [45:07]
Dr. Priscilla Johnson
Yes, I agree. As a matter of fact, I'm preparing for a workshop I'm giving on Monday. It's a simulated cyber attack on the Hoover Dam, which supplies energy and water through Lake Mead back to the greater Clark county area. And part of what I'm doing is these are water researchers that I'm talking to. Some of them are practitioners, but they're mostly researchers and it's about situational awareness really. So am I going there to teach them cybersecurity principles? Absolutely, yes, they're going to learn some of that. Am I going there to teach them about some of the tactics that are used by cyber threat actors? Absolutely, they're going to learn some of that. But essentially what they're going to learn is the landscape and the absolute breath, the persistence of these types of attacks on our systems on a daily basis. And then if you go into most of the circles, everyone talks about living off the land and how they're already in our systems. These, the adversaries are sitting in our systems now just waiting for an opportune time. And that is, if we already know that, then how can we expel them? How can we close the doors? But a lot of times we just want to see what they're doing. So there's that piece. Right. But the situational awareness is important because there are still some, there's still that human component that is feeding into why they're successful. There are business email compromises, there are social engineering techniques to be able to extract information from people. Just look at the MGM casino heist, I call it. The 17 year old makes a phone call and says hey, I need to reset my password, pretending as if. And so it's these very basic things that we need to start thinking about guarding our own pii, which is already, our personal identifiable information is already out there. Our Social Security numbers, we just heard, I, I think everyone's profile is on some dark web website somewhere at some point. So now it's just really us to, up to us to be proactive but also be vigilant about the techniques that are being used.
- [47:30]
Jim Love
One of the reasons I most wanted to have this conversation and it's been fascinating, I, I am so pleased to have met you. It's been fascinating, but it's. I think one of the things we struggle with is getting good people into cybersecurity. And I think a look at your career and what you've done, and I'm going to say unlikely, I will totally respect the challenges of growing up black in the US and what that does, but being a woman in this area, being someone who's got a moral compass that needs. That you need to work with, all of those could be barriers to your progress. You've obviously smashed through all of them. If you were speaking to other people, be they women or be there anybody else who was coming in, what would you say to them about how they might approach a career in cybersecurity from what you've seen so far?
- [48:26]
Dr. Priscilla Johnson
Thank you for that question because I mentor a lot of people, so you've given me a platform to talk to even more people, mentor all genders, all ethnicities, all nationalities. People contact from me from around the world asking for advice, and I give them my time and usually the first interaction, because I have many interactions with them over the course of their. From when they contact me, the first conversation I have with them is really a philosophical one, and it has to do with knowing yourself. And again, back to those questions. What's going to get you out of bed every single day? Sometimes people already know what they want to do, but they don't know how to go about and do it. So that question becomes, what do you want to develop as a habit that you do every day? Whether it's, I get up and I am not just because I'm talking to you, Jev, but I get up and I listen to cybersecurity today every day. That's what I do. I listen to cybersecurity today. I listen to other podcasts, but this is actually my favorite podcast. If you want to educate yourself on something new, do that. And that's what I did. I found cyber security Today out there on Apple podcast and said, okay. And I started listening. And it was so educational and natural, the way that the folks were talking. It was so natural. Nobody was selling anything. It wasn't some big marketing push. It wasn't anything like that. It was simple. It was short. Short. It was to the point. And so educating yourself and finding a vehicle that will give you whatever you need, wherever you are. So that's the other key point, is not only knowing what will get you out of bed every day, is finding something that's accessible to you that will inform your decisions and Then I would say the third thing is just finding the people who will help you reach out. LinkedIn is an amazing tool. LinkedIn is probably the best tool in my opinion. Going to conferences and finding out people who are interested in you. But also ask questions when you're at these conferences and take away the fear of someone who will think I'm, I'm stupid if I ask this question. No, ask the question, because that opens you up to, first of all, getting your question answered, and second of all, having someone else be interested in you. So with that, cybersecurity is very much a profession that wants you. If you're listening, they really want you as a person to come in and grapple with some of these things. When I was putting this conference together, I was just almost overwhelmed by how complicated this feat is that we have every single day thousands, if not millions of attacks on systems. And it's not because they're trying to do something good. These are adversaries trying to do something that is harmful and then realizing that the Internet was never really built with security in mind. And I think that's what takes you back. And there's a fantastic article called the Net of insecurity from 2015, May 30, 2015, by Craig Timber from the Washington Post. How do I know that author and the date so well? Because yesterday I spent a few hours trying to find that article. And it is such a good article that talks about the beginnings of the Internet as we are experiencing it today and why cybersecurity is so necessary because it was not built to be secure. Now, I say that with a caveat that there are some people, like Vincer, who did want to have security embedded and encryption embedded in the Internet in the way that he thought would be more secure. But he was voted down and I'll just leave it at that. You can read the article. So that's what I would say to people who are interested in cybersecurity. We want you. I'm breaking into the profession. I'm on the cyber intelligence side. I'm not doing the IT part, although I understand it. Come, there's plenty of work to do.
- [53:20]
Jim Love
And on that happy note, thank you so much for this conversation. This has been fabulous. And that's our show. This has been what I hope is the first in my profile series, discussions with fascinating people. I have another of these that I'm releasing next Tuesday on Trending, my daily tech news show. Check it out if you're interested and let me know if you want to hear or see more stories like this, you can reach me at editorialechnewsday ca. That's editorialechnewsday ca. Or if you're watching this on YouTube, just drop me a note in the comments. I'm your host, Jim Love. Thanks for listening.