Podcast: Cyber Focus: Cybersecurity, National Security, and Critical Infrastructure (LS 30 · TOP 5% what is this?)Episode: How Do You Rebuild Systems That Can't Go Offline? with Peraton's Tom AffertonPub date: 2026-08-04Get Podcast Transcript →powered by Listen411 - fast audio-to-text and summarizationTom Afferton [00:00:00]: If you're introducing security controls or a maintenance activity or modernization that interrupts that operation, then you're no better off than if there was a cyber interruption. Frank Cilluffo [00:00:16]: Welcome to Cyber Focus from the McCrary Institute, where we explore the people and ideas shaping and defending our digital world. I'm your host, Frank Cilluffo, and this week I have the privilege to sit down with Tom Afferton. Tom is president of the Cyber and Intelligence Service at Peraton, where he oversees a number of the most mission-critical entities inside the US government and has been there for a number of years. Prior to that, he also was at AT&T and many years at Northrop Grumman. Tom, thank you so much for joining us today. Tom Afferton [00:00:50]: Happy to be here. Frank Cilluffo [00:00:50]: So I thought I'd start at the beginning, and a lot of your clients are mission-critical. Tom Afferton [00:00:57]: Yes. Frank Cilluffo [00:00:57]: And very different than a traditional IT enterprise. And I'd be curious what that looks like. Why is that different and what your initial thoughts are there? Tom Afferton [00:01:07]: So when we look at a lot of the systems services that we protect, you have to think about the consequences of them not operating. When we think about, you know, a large-scale modernization as well, right, you have to think about the whole point of, of cybersecurity is to protect that institution, to protect its operability. So if you're introducing security controls or a maintenance activity or modernization that interrupts that operation, then you're no better off than if there was a cyber interruption, right? And so when we go through, again, thinking about something like a modernization, we take an approach we call sort of a layered uplift, which is you introduce that new capability in an incremental way. You make sure that it's instrumented so that as you introduce it, you're monitoring, is it doing what you expected it to do? And then over time, it takes on more responsibilities. And then ultimately, you can turn off the legacy environment. Now, there's of course prioritization involved, deciding, you know, where are you going to start? Where are you going to build in that resilience and redundancy? Something that Nick Andersen over at CISA has introduced, the term of ruthless prioritization. Frank Cilluffo [00:02:37]: Mm-hmm. Tom Afferton [00:02:38]: And I think that's helpful. It's helpful when thinking about resilience planning. It's helpful when thinking about planning resources up front, coordination, but it's then also helpful in thinking about incident response. And when I've heard him speak and he's explained it, what he's talking about is going beyond just prioritizing a category of critical infrastructure. It's understanding that, you know, the key mission, the crown jewel that we need to have keep operating, we need to understand the assets associated with it. Frank Cilluffo [00:03:13]: Mm-hmm. Tom Afferton [00:03:14]: So what GPU is that workload or that workflow operating in what cluster and what data centers powered by what part of the grid? And knowing that sort of connection between the critical infrastructure and the mission and the physical and the technical infrastructure allows you to then prioritize. Frank Cilluffo [00:03:32]: Because you really can't pause operations during an upgrade, right? Tom Afferton [00:03:36]: Absolutely. Frank Cilluffo [00:03:37]: So it's a challenge. These are— because you're also behind a number of critical systems that most Americans don't think about every day. Tom Afferton [00:03:44]: That's right. Frank Cilluffo [00:03:45]: One in particular that's gotten a little bit of news, and I know we can't get into great detail here, is FAA and the modernization. Tom Afferton [00:03:51]: Yeah. And that's an interesting one. Peraton's very proud to be part of that. The administration has framed that as one of the most important modernization projects in American history. And part of that is because, you know, our air travel depends upon it, right? It's critical to our economy, but it's also large and complex. One of my colleagues, Justin Sciaccio, is the one leading that for Peraton, and he recently met with stakeholders in the press along with Secretary Duffy to talk about the program. Frank Cilluffo [00:04:23]: Mm-hmm. Tom Afferton [00:04:23]: And what Secretary Duffy explained is that they were looking to do something radically different in terms of program management and bring in an integration partner. And Peraton were— we were fortunate to be selected to do that. And one of the reasons that they selected us is that we've brought a revolutionary agentic AI technology to the equation. Frank Cilluffo [00:04:44]: Mm-hmm. Tom Afferton [00:04:45]: And what Justin has been explaining that we're doing is we are ingesting I think it was like something 5.7 million records of schedule data as well as historical information about projects that have completed, and then have the AI start to do analysis around that so that we can stress test schedules, you know, we can identify gaps and whatnot. And he had this quote that sort of went viral that he said, like, we're not looking to replace the humans. We want to enable them to have superhuman insights. And that's what we're really— what we're finding here. And it's just the schedule, all the interdependencies, all the suppliers, all the different sites. It's just too much for one person to consume. And so providing those insights has been part of the value add there. Frank Cilluffo [00:05:29]: And, you know, you can't escape without us getting into a conversation around AI and agentic AI. Tom Afferton [00:05:34]: Sure. Frank Cilluffo [00:05:36]: What it means for threat hunters. But before jumping there, I mean, you've got technology time cycles that are moving so fast, but a lot of the systems you're dealing with here are in very different timelines. And we've had a number of discussions around the energy sector and grid, and we don't have to go there, but a lot of their OT systems are 25, 30 years old, and they're being netted with IoT devices and it brings about a new attack surface. How do you reconcile sort of that balance between a fast-moving tech cycle and not always so fast critical infrastructure sector? Tom Afferton [00:06:13]: So I'll jump to the answer, but then I want to go back and I will give you an example of the type of work that our folks are doing because I think it illustrates the sort of both ends of the spectrum. Frank Cilluffo [00:06:24]: And your an EE background, right? Tom Afferton [00:06:25]: Right, thank you. Yes. Frank Cilluffo [00:06:26]: Stanford and UVA. Tom Afferton [00:06:27]: So go Hoos. So— Frank Cilluffo [00:06:30]: Blue and orange. You know the history between the football uniforms between Auburn, UVA, and Clemson. Tom Afferton [00:06:27]: No, I don't. Frank Cilluffo [00:06:36]: All right. This is— sorry, but— Tom Afferton [00:06:38]: That's okay. Frank Cilluffo [00:06:39]: We will include this in the episode. So initially, the first football coach at Auburn was a football coach at UVA, brought the uniforms because they were so expensive. And then he went to Clemson and brought the uniforms. That's why it turned less than blue. It was a little more purple. So true story. Tom Afferton [00:06:55]: I did not know that. Frank Cilluffo [00:06:56]: Yeah. Tom Afferton [00:06:57]: So going back to the question about sort of the pace of technology, right? So if, you know, we were to talk 6 months ago, we would have been talking about buying back time to the analysts. And that's still important and something that I do want to talk about. We look now within the age of Mythos and, you know, the ability for agentic AI to produce vulnerabilities at an unprecedented speed and scale, right, the cutting edge is now thinking about automating remediations and sort of the bottleneck has shifted down. But before we go to either of those, I think it's helpful to just have— let's have a practical example. Like, this is a day in the life of some of my folks. Frank Cilluffo [00:07:37]: Mm-hmm. Tom Afferton [00:07:38]: I have some folks that are supporting CISA in the Code and Media Analysis Team, and they are involved with malware analysis and ultimately incident response for critical infrastructure. So without getting into any details, right, one recent situation- they were brought in as a result of some classified intel to take a look at some malware. They did some analysis to determine kind of what vulnerabilities it was associated with. They determined that it was associated with some edge devices and sort of double alarm bells went off because number one, they were edge devices that could be used in a carrier network, that OT was being used, basically programmable logic controllers sitting behind these edge devices that had no inherent security in them. So if you penetrated this edge device, you could get access to the programmable logic controllers and control that environment. And then secondly, these edge devices were also in federal civilian executive branch. So from— and you go back to in a critical environment, what do you need to think about? Well, one is consequences. Frank Cilluffo [00:08:49]: Mm-hmm. Tom Afferton [00:08:49]: So, okay, This has potentially wide-ranging impact. The second then is sort of thinking about it from a risk standpoint. And so now these folks are going off and looking on— they know the right blog posts. There is some of the monitoring that CISA does. Combine that with some tradecraft on the dark web
