Former NSA Director Paul Nakasone Opens Private Security Advisory Firm

Key points

• General Paul Nakasone, who led the National Security Agency (NSA) from 2018 to 2024, has launched a new private advisory business called the Nakasone Group.
• The firm will advise government leaders, large corporations, and prominent private families on cybersecurity, geopolitical risk, and personal security threats.
• Nakasone brings direct experience overseeing U.S. offensive and defensive cyber operations, including the command that ran cyber missions against foreign adversaries.
• The move follows a pattern of senior intelligence officials moving into private consulting after federal service.

What is the Nakasone Group and who is it for?

The Nakasone Group is a new advisory firm built around one very specific credential: its founder ran the most powerful signals intelligence (spy communications) and offensive cyber operation in the world for six years.

General Paul Nakasone led the NSA, the U.S. government agency responsible for intercepting foreign communications and protecting American government networks, from 2018 until his retirement in early 2024. He simultaneously led United States Cyber Command, the military unit that carries out offensive cyber operations against foreign targets. That dual role gave him a view of the threat landscape that very few people on earth have held.

The new firm, first reported by SecurityWeek, will counsel a broad mix of clients: government bodies, corporations, and wealthy private families who face serious security or geopolitical risks. Think of it as a very senior security consultant you call when the stakes are genuinely high.

Should ordinary people care about this?

Directly, probably not. The Nakasone Group is not pitching small businesses or individuals.

Broadly, though, the firm's existence tells us something worth knowing: the line between public intelligence work and private security advice keeps blurring. When a four-star general with top-secret clearances moves to a paying advisory role, the expertise and (to the extent the law allows) the pattern-recognition built over decades follows.

For large organisations, particularly those in critical infrastructure sectors like energy, finance, or healthcare, this kind of senior-level advice is increasingly seen as necessary. Nation-state hackers, groups tracked by vendors like Mandiant and CrowdStrike under names like Sandworm (a Russian military hacking cluster) or Volt Typhoon (a Chinese group focused on U.S. infrastructure), target these sectors persistently. Organisations that once thought a basic IT team was enough are rethinking that position.

What does this signal about the threat environment?

The demand is real. Nakasone would not be launching a firm if clients were not already asking.

Senior practitioners from the intelligence community carry something no vendor can fully replicate: direct, operational knowledge of how adversary groups actually work, not just what their malware looks like after the fact. At medium confidence, a firm like this will attract clients worried about exactly the groups Nakasone spent his career tracking: state-sponsored hackers working for Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea.

For everyone else, the practical takeaway is simpler. If the people who ran America's cyber defences at the highest level are now selling advice to private organisations, those organisations clearly believe the threat is serious enough to pay for it. That should inform how any organisation, large or small, thinks about its own security posture.