Mm-hmm.

But really, I mean, the answer is it's hard.

It takes a lot of work to identify who your vital customers are, uh, because y- you have to have some understanding of your community.

The, the ideal version of CI Fortify is really coming together as a community and saying, "How do I create an island of resilience where I know that we'll be self-sufficient if help isn't coming?" Right? Uh, and a lot of CI Fortify is really built on this idea of, you know, nobody is coming to save you-

Mm-hmm.

So I can either create a false positive-ridden environment, I have to hire a bunch of people for a SIEM or a SOC, I have to have people monitoring all of these logs, or I can add an if statement to one computer and I could actually just get rid of this.

Well, that seems like a winning proposition to me.

So government, and particularly Secure by Design when I joined CISA, it really just felt like a case of there's all these problems out there.

Then Hurricane Helene hit.

Trees fell down all over the roads that we had to chainsaw out for Saturday and Sunday, and we get to the main road, you know, it's, uh, news that the bridge, the big, Big Hungry River bridge, and it's gone.

Like metal was down the river.

Three days after the hurricane hit, some rescuers delivered food and water by zip line and air lifted some residents with health issues out, leaving Rogers and the remaining neighbors to figure out what to do.

And I've been up there long enough to know that there is a, um, way to go out the game lands at the end of Big Hungry through some trails and, uh, I had a Jeep, and I thought if I could get to Deep Gap Road, I could get to, um, Hendersonville.