# The Nakasone Group Is Open for Business. Here's What That Actually Means.
Paul Nakasone spent five years seeing things most people in Washington only hear about in classified briefings. Now he's selling access to that view.
The former NSA director and head of US Cyber Command announced the formation of the Nakasone Group this week, a boutique advisory firm targeting government leaders, corporations, and — in a phrase that stood out — "prominent families" facing cybersecurity, geopolitical, and personal security risks. The announcement was brief on specifics, as these things tend to be. But the firm's existence is worth sitting with for a moment, because what Nakasone brings to the table is genuinely unusual, and the market he's entering tells you something real about where enterprise security is headed.
## What This Man Actually Knows
Nakasone led NSA and Cyber Command from 2018 to 2023. That's the period that included the SolarWinds campaign, the Colonial Pipeline attack, the Log4Shell scramble, and the early stages of what we now understand as China's long campaign to pre-position inside US critical infrastructure — Salt Typhoon, Volt Typhoon, and everything that hasn't been named yet.
He didn't just read intelligence on those incidents. He ran the operational response on some of them and built the doctrine that shaped others. When Cyber Command started doing "defend forward" operations — hunting adversaries on foreign networks before they could strike — Nakasone was the architect. When NSA stood up the Cybersecurity Directorate in 2019, that was his call.
That operational depth is different from what most security consultants sell. Most advisory shops offer frameworks, compliance roadmaps, and former agency analysts who last touched classified systems a decade ago. Nakasone is two years removed from running the most powerful signals intelligence apparatus on earth.
## The Revolving Door Problem Nobody Wants to Name
This is the part where a certain type of reader expects hand-wringing about the revolving door between government service and private consulting. That's a legitimate concern — but it's also a tired one that usually avoids the harder question.
The harder question is: what happens to the advice when the clients include both "government leaders" and "corporations"? Nakasone's firm, as described, isn't a defense contractor. It's an advisory group. That means the deliverable is judgment, analysis, and recommendations — which means the most valuable thing he has is a mental model of how nation-state actors operate.
Chinese APT groups, Russian GRU units, Iranian IRGC-affiliated hackers — Nakasone has watched all of them operate at the highest level of visibility available to any person on the planet. If a Fortune 100 company wants to understand whether their infrastructure looks like a target to Volt Typhoon's playbook, Nakasone can answer that question with more credibility than anyone currently operating in the commercial advisory space.
The tension isn't that he left government to make money. The tension is that the same strategic clarity he can offer a US defense contractor, he could theoretically offer any client. The firm's described client list — "government leaders, corporations, prominent families" — suggests they're staying on the US-aligned side of that line. But advisory firms don't always publish their client lists.
## The Keith Alexander Comparison Nobody Should Skip
Any honest look at Nakasone's move has to acknowledge what happened to Keith Alexander.
Alexander ran NSA before Nakasone, then founded IronNet Cybersecurity in 2014. The pitch was similar: former director, deep operational knowledge, translating that into enterprise security products and services. IronNet went public via SPAC in 2021. By September 2023, the company had ceased operations, filed for bankruptcy, and its executives were facing SEC fraud charges related to revenue recognition.
IronNet's collapse wasn't because Alexander lacked credibility or knowledge. It's because converting intelligence-grade threat awareness into a recurring revenue commercial product is genuinely hard, and because the market for "former director as product" is smaller and more skeptical than the initial pitch suggests. Enterprise security buyers are sophisticated. They want results, not biography.
The Nakasone Group appears to be structured differently — advisory and consulting, not a product company. That's probably the right lesson drawn from the IronNet experience. Margins are thinner, scale is harder, but you're not betting the firm on a SaaS platform that has to compete with Crowdstrike.
## "Prominent Families" Is the Line Everyone Glossed Over
The press coverage of this launch mostly treated the client list as boilerplate. It isn't.
"Prominent families" is a specific market signal. It points toward the ultra-high-net-worth personal security space — a sector that has expanded dramatically over the last three years as threat actors have increasingly targeted executives, board members, and their relatives through social engineering, SIM swapping, and physical surveillance combined with digital intrusion.
This isn't paranoia. The CEO of Telegram was arrested in France last year. Executives at crypto firms have had family members kidnapped to extract seed phrases. Nation-state actors have gone after family members of intelligence officials as leverage. The personal security threat surface for people with real money and real influence has never been larger or more technically complex.
If Nakasone is going to advise prominent families, he's entering a space where operational security at the personal level — travel threat assessment, device hygiene, relationship-based social engineering defenses — meets the kind of adversary modeling he spent his career doing. That's a genuinely underserved market, and one where his background is close to uniquely relevant.
## HackWire Analysis
The launch of the Nakasone Group lands at a specific moment in the evolution of the security advisory market, and that timing matters more than the announcement itself.
We are two years into the public acknowledgment that China's Volt Typhoon campaign pre-positioned access inside US critical infrastructure — water utilities, energy grids, transportation systems — not to steal data but to be ready to cause disruption in a conflict scenario. Salt Typhoon's penetration of US telecom carriers, which gave China access to wiretap systems and reportedly compromised the communications of senior government officials, was disclosed in late 2024. Neither of those campaigns has been fully remediated. Both are ongoing in various forms.
Against that backdrop, an advisory firm founded by the person who ran NSA during that period isn't just a career move — it's a market response to a genuine demand signal. Boards of directors, particularly at critical infrastructure companies, are increasingly being held accountable by regulators and shareholders for cyber risk. They want advisors who can speak to that risk with authority that survives a hostile deposition or a congressional hearing.
What's missing from most coverage of this launch is the regulatory dimension. The SEC's cyber incident disclosure rules, CISA's new reporting mandates, and the ongoing rollout of sector-specific cyber requirements have created a compliance-adjacent advisory market that didn't exist five years ago. Nakasone doesn't need to compete with McKinsey on that territory — he needs to be the person McKinsey calls when the client asks whether their incident response plan would actually survive a Volt Typhoon-tier intrusion.
Whether the Nakasone Group succeeds depends less on his credentials than on whether he can build a team that operationalizes his knowledge into repeatable advisory deliverables. The credential is the door-opener. The methodology is the business.
Watch for who he hires. That'll tell you what he's actually building.
— HackWire Editorial
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