Ukrainian Cyber War Confirms the Lesson: Cyber Power Requires Soft Power
Jason Healey
Senior Research Scholar in the Faculty of International and Public Affairs; Adjunct Professor of International and Public Affairs
Personal Details
Jason Healey is a Senior Research Scholar at Columbia University’s School for International and Public Affairs specializing in cyber risk and conflict. He has taught and mentored hundreds of students who have gone onto careers at the White House, the finance sectors, civil society, and everywhere in between. Prior to Columbia, he was the founding director of the Cyber Statecraft Initiative of the Atlantic Council where he created the global “Cyber 9/12” student cyber-policy competition. He is the editor of the first history of conflict in cyberspace, A Fierce Domain: Cyber Conflict, 1986 to 2012. A frequent keynote speaker on these issues, he is rated as a “top-rated” speaker for the RSA Conference and won the inaugural “Best of Briefing Award” at Black Hat.
Jason was a founding member of both the Office of the National Cyber Director at the White House (2022) and the first cyber command in the world, the Joint Task Force for Computer Network Defense in 1998, where he was one of the early pioneers of cyber threat intelligence. During an earlier job in the White House, he was a director for cyber policy, coordinating efforts to secure US cyberspace and critical infrastructure. He created Goldman Sachs’ first cyber incident response capability and later oversaw the bank’s crisis management and business continuity in Asia. He served as the vice chair of the Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center (FS-ISAC). He is on the review board of the DEF CON and Black Hat hacker conferences, served on the Defense Science Board task force on cyber deterrence, and is past president and founding board member of the Cyber Conflict Studies Association. He started his career as a US Air Force intelligence officer with jobs at the Pentagon and National Security Agency and is a certified board director (NACD.DC) and information systems security professional (CISSP).
Education
- United States Air Force Academy
- Johns Hopkins University
- James Madison University
Research And Publications
Cyber Risk and Financial Stability – An Atlas for Macroprudential Analysis
Columbia SIPA Working Paper
Journal of Financial Transformation
Lawfare
Brookings Report
In The Media
Jason Healey discusses the foundational principles of cyber conflict, the importance of soft power in influencing adversaries, and the need for greater awareness of key documents shaping the field.
Report of diverse cybersecurity experts draws on recent high-profile incidents.
In this recent podcast conversation, Jason Healey looks back on 25 years of White House cyber policies dating from the Clinton administration to the present day.
Professor Jason Healey uses two existing frameworks - the NIST CSF and Lockheed Martin's Cyber Kill Chain - to map the advantages that AI poses for both offense and defense in cyberspace.
The new National Cybersecurity Strategy, writes Jason Healey, builds on a longstanding consensus but differs in important and perhaps overdue ways.