Hi and welcome to malicious life in collaboration with Cyber Reason.

I'm Ren Levy. Could you start off by briefly introducing yourself?

Sure, Nate, my name's

And I work in the cyber security industry.

I've been doing this job for over 20 years.

Out of concerns for privacy, in today's episode of Malicious Life will not be disclosing

the name of our interviewee. For purposes of telling the story though, we'll call him Randy.

We also can't disclose what company Randy was working for

about two decades ago when our story takes place. What I can tell

you about Randy is this. He's a lot like many of you out there. He joined the cybersecurity industry at the turn of the millennium.

He had a neck for computers, but otherwise was pretty much just getting the handle of things.

A bright-eyed kid trying to make something of himself.

His first break in the industry was a job with one of the largest software companies in the world. His second break early on his tenure there was a very big assignment.

I was working for a very large organization that gave me the opportunity to from an engineering

perspective to learn about something of this scale and I was a young kid so I was really

interested.

Here's where Randy isn't like a lot of you out there.

He was only recently out of college when his new employer sent him off on a foreign assignment to help build the single

most significant cyber security asset on the planet.

Did you have a sense of just how massive and impactful the project was going to be?

Firstly from a technical standpoint and secondly from the political standpoint?

As I went into it, I had no idea what it actually meant for the people.

...