5 Questions with...John Hayes

John Hayes has been a leader in cybersecurity and networking for more than 30 years. John is presently co-founder and CTO of Emergent Security and leads their R&D and intellectual property efforts at ES1 Labs. He has served as co-founder and CTO for BlackRidge Technology, 54th Street Systems, and Azule Technology. He was co-founder and architect at Alteon WebSystems. John is also a managing partner with Ridge Partners LLC, where he has been providing expert consulting for more than 20 years. John has 20 granted patents with additional patent applications pending.?

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What are your passions???

I like finding hard problems and then coming up with creative solutions to those problems. I’ve been doing that my whole career. ?

?Personally, I really like running marathons. I finished one most recently in December of this year and I have another one coming up soon. I’ve done the big races like New York City and Paris, but I really prefer the smaller and local marathons.?

How did you get started in cybersecurity???

I started building network equipment in the early 90s and observed that?back then security wasn't part of the engineering requirements. So, I made it part of this process to prioritize identifying all the insecurities within devices, and my involvement grew from there. I saw the difficult problem in digital security gaps and wanted to come up with a solution to that problem.?

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What do you see as the risks and opportunities related to cybersecurity???

Firstly, cybersecurity is not "fix it and forget". Unfortunately, this is often the hope or expectation of operators. There will always be adversaries. It is a continuous journey that doesn't let up. It is an ongoing defensive and offensive struggle.?

Secondly, all of us are dealing with insecure things; networks and systems that existed before Internet of Things (IoT). So, the challenge is how do you address the legacy infrastructures and make them retroactively secure and how do you address moving forward? That is a problem but also an opportunity.?

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What do you see as Invisinet's opportunities and strengths???

Over the years, the company has learned a lot and has a mature Zero Trust product. Some aspects of Invisinet’s Zero Trust?have been adopted by the U.S. Department of Defense, so it has been proven its value in military-grade applications. It has a proactive solution for cloaking networks/assets and securing identity-based access. These are some unique strengths of Invisinet.?

Invisinet’s opportunities are endless. But specifically, all IoT operations can benefit from its solution in providing true and additional authentication at the network level. The easy, lightweight software integration, provided at a low cost, can be such a benefit.?

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Why did you join the Advisory Board at Invisinet???

I believe in Invisinet, and I have a deep understanding of its technology. As co-founder of BlackRidge Technology, the original tech behind Invisinet, I have some good experience. My key learnings from the past can be applied to the future. It will be nice to jump back in and continue to help see the technology applied to practical applications.?