Leader of DOD’s Cyber Crime Center steps down

Jude Sunderbruch has retired from his role as executive director of the Department of Defense Cyber Crime Center, the organization announced Thursday.

He exited the job June 18 and also retired from the Senior Executive Service and Air Force Reserve, where he reached the rank of colonel, according to a release.

Sunderbruch took the helm of DC3 in August 2022. The organization — which supports DOD components, other agencies, international partners and industry — provides services to boost cyber training, digital and multimedia forensics, vulnerability disclosure, cybersecurity support to the defense industrial base, analysis and operational enablement, and advanced technical solutions and capabilities. That includes running the Cyber Training Academy, Cyber Forensics Laboratory and DOD Vulnerability Disclosure Program.

The agency plays a key role in supporting law enforcement and counterintelligence investigations and operations, including by integrating emerging technologies “to enhance collaboration, interoperability, and the collective capabilities of DoD and Federal LE/CI, cybersecurity, and acquisition communities,” according to its website.

During a recent interview on the sidelines of DefenseScoop’s DefenseTalks conference, Sunderbruch outlined some of the benefits that artificial intelligence could bring to the Pentagon and its partners.

“The Department of Defense is filled with processes. And I think that AI, particularly some of the innovative things that are coming out of industry, are really going to allow us to simplify a lot of things to make it much, much faster for us to get after the mission. And so I’ll give you an example. One of the things that we’ve been working on in DC3 is a vulnerability disclosure program in support of the defense industrial base. There are a lot of manual processes associated with that as we onboard companies, as we work to work with the partners, the researchers. And we’ve been working to apply AI to that so that we can make the entire system go faster, be nimbler. And then when we do need to have a human involved, it can be much for that person-to-person interface, where a lot of the manual processes have been taken care of by AI,” he said.

The technology could also help with threat identification efforts, he suggested.

“I think there’s a lot of exciting things that can be done there in terms of gathering insights and information and preparing them for analysts so that they can have a foundation and a place to start. That’ll be very helpful in cybersecurity, but other areas of national security as well. And then I’d say that the second part is the follow up. And that’s why I think working with industry for defense- and intelligence community-focused solutions will be very exciting. There will be times that we’ll have information that we may not want to have directly input into a large language model accessible, you know, to the public, but I think that industry is engaged on this and I think we have a lot of opportunities to work together with them,” Sunderbruch said.

Sunderbruch is retiring after a long career in government service. He joined the Air Force in 1994 and served as an active duty Air Force Office of Special Investigations special agent from 1994 to 2001, before becoming a civilian government employee and Air Force reservist, according to his bio.

His most recent roles in government include executive director of the Air Force Office of Special Investigations, counterintelligence coordinating authority for U.S. European Command, and special advisor to the assistant director for the FBI cyber division.

DC3 Deputy Director Joshua Black is now serving as the interim executive director of the organization in the wake of Sunderbruch’s departure, per the release.