Richard H. Ledgett (Credit: public domain)
“Rick Ledgett recently joined the new advisory board of Halkuyt [sic] Cyber, the specialist subsidiary of the upscale British corporate intelligence firm Hakluyt. The unit, which opened discreetly in 2015, is headed by Nicholas ‘Nick’ Bidmead. A member of the US Chamber of Commerce, Ledgett will help develop Hakluyt Cyber’s business in the US and Canada.
In June this year, Ledgett also became an advisor to the cybersecurity giant Palo Alto Networks. After retiring from the NSA in 2017, he joined the board of M&T Bank. He is also an advisor to Polaris Alpha, Peter Cannito’s firm, which was acquired in May by the infrastructure protection giant Parsons, and to QiO Technologies, a cloud security and data mining company.
Ledgett is also a member of the Alliance for Securing Democracies (ASD), a pressure group founded in response to the hacking of the Democratic Party in 2016. Both Republican and Democratic iconic senior officials including Michael Chertoff and John Podesta, who was targeted by hackers in 2016, are members of the pressure group.
At Hakluyt Cyber, which employs a number of former interceptions staff of Five Eyes alliance member states (IOL 789), Ledgett will work with two British technical interceptions heavyweights, Iain Lobban, who headed GCHQ, Britain’s equivalent of the NSA, from 2008 to 2014, and his former number two, Andrew France. Lobban and France are also in high demand in the cyber sector. Iain Lobban is an advisor to C5 Capital, the fund established by Andre Pienaar, as well as to the cryptology start-up SQR System and Standard Chartered Bank (IOL 757), while Andy France advises Darktrace, Deep Secure, Prevalent AI, RedQ and Telstra (IOL 807, IOL 767). (Intelligence Online, 9/26/2018) (Archive)