{"id":753492,"date":"2026-11-15T04:50:44","date_gmt":"2026-11-15T01:50:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/where-was-nvidias-security-team\/"},"modified":"2026-11-15T04:50:44","modified_gmt":"2026-11-15T01:50:44","slug":"where-was-nvidias-security-team","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/where-was-nvidias-security-team\/","title":{"rendered":"Where was Nvidia’s security team?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Outsiders had little reason to notice when Nvidia\u2019s longtime chief security officer and head of product security stepped down in August. Just two and a half months later, CEO Jensen Huang himself left the company over growing questions about his extramarital relationships \u2014 starting with an executive at Megaspeed, a Singapore data center company that U.S. investigators suspect of funneling Nvidia chips to China, then widening to reports about two separate affairs with Nvidia employees.<\/p>\n

At the time, David Reber, who spent four years as CSO and seven at Nvidia overall, said he was leaving for health reasons. \u201cThis wasn\u2019t a pivot I had planned. But I know what needs to come first: family and health,\u201d he wrote on LinkedIn in late August, disclosing that he\u2019d been diagnosed with young-onset Parkinson\u2019s more than two years ago. <\/p>\n

Reber\u2019s replacement, Sa\u0161a Zdjelar, previously spent 17 years at ExxonMobil in Houston, leaving as a senior IT manager before spending one year at Salesforce and several years at the cybersecurity company ReversingLabs. Zdjelar didn\u2019t respond to questions Thursday about the transition or what the security team knew.<\/p>\n

Nothing public connects Reber\u2019s or Zdjelar\u2019s role changes to the Megaspeed matter, but it seems fair to wonder what Nvidia\u2019s security team knew about the government\u2019s scrutiny of Megaspeed and about Huang\u2019s relationships, and whether anyone raised concerns. Reber didn\u2019t respond to questions Thursday. Nvidia also has not answered our related questions.<\/p>\n

Not all of those relationships are the business of the security team. Relationships with subordinates typically fall to HR, legal, and the board. But an affair with an executive at a company under federal investigation is a different animal. (Megaspeed has denied any wrongdoing.) Security specialists say affairs can create vulnerabilities that foreign intelligence services look to exploit. <\/p>\n

Catching that kind of exposure isn\u2019t easy. The way intelligence services collect information, much of it through everyday conversation rather than hacking, makes it especially difficult for security teams to identify risks, according to retired senior intelligence officer Nicholas Eftimiades, who says he has trained more than 1,000 corporate security professionals.<\/p>\n

Some people inside Nvidia clearly knew parts of the picture. Nvidia\u2019s top lawyer was engaged with the government\u2019s Megaspeed inquiry more than a year ago, The New York Times reported earlier this week<\/a>. (Nvidia has said it regularly contacts officials.) Reports about Huang\u2019s relationships with employees suggest colleagues also knew of them, even if the behavior is not expressly forbidden by Nvidia\u2019s code of conduct<\/a>. The Times cited five Nvidia employees who said he was involved with a vice president who reported directly to him, and Reuters, citing two people, later reported a second relationship. What\u2019s unclear is whether any of that reached security.<\/p>\n

Even if it had reached Nvidia\u2019s security team, Eftimiades, who wrote Chinese Espionage Operations and Tactics<\/em> in 2020, said a security team\u2019s resources are often limited. For one thing, they\u2019re often underfunded because, unlike some other cost centers, they don\u2019t drive revenue. It\u2019s astonishingly common for CEOs to answer a security team\u2019s warnings with \u201cnot a nickel more than compliance,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Many companies also define security very narrowly, specialists say. In an opinion piece in The Hill<\/a>, Don Aviv, CEO of the corporate investigations firm Interfor International, and author Jeremy Hurewitz, wrote, \u201cToo many companies still app<\/a>roach security primarily as a matter of protecting facilities, preventing cyberattacks, and responding to physical threats.\u201d The two argued that \u201c[s]ecurity teams need to pay greater attention to insider threats, including the cultivation of executives and employees by foreign intelligence services, suspicious business relationships, conflicts of interest and attempts to obtain sensitive information through trusted personal contacts.\u201d<\/p>\n

Still, some of it is beyond what any team can do. Speaking general<\/a>ly, not about Huang, Eftimiades offered a hypothetical in which a CEO complains that he can\u2019t do something because \u201cI\u2019m fighting a board who doesn\u2019t want to do this.\u201d That tells an intelligence asset who the obstacle is. The service then asks, \u201cWho\u2019s the sticking point here?\u201d and looks for ways into that person\u2019s email and phone.<\/p>\n

What a rival intelligence service wants is often less technology<\/a> than policy insight, including who\u2019s pushing to change export rules and who the biggest blocker is. \u201cIntel world tends to be like cancer,\u201d he said. \u201cOnce it gets into the body, it looks to spread and looks to reach out.\u201d<\/p>\n

The playbook isn\u2019t new, Eftimiades added, \u201cparticularly for China.\u201d Any executive dealing with the country \u201cwill tell you that they\u2019ve been approached.\u201d He said there are also \u201ctons of diplomat stories\u201d of U.S. diplomats walking into a hotel room to find a woman on the bed. He said what\u2019s newer compared with Soviet era spying is the relationships these services cultivate now often last years, not weeks.<\/p>\n

Technology can augment that human intelligence, Eftimiades said, pointing to IMSI catchers are one example. These devices mimic a cell tower so that nearby phones connect to them. A basic version can cost about $1,000 and fit in a suitcase, he said, though government-grade models cost far more. <\/p>\n

Eftimiades says no one knows yet if these were used against Huang, whose phone was presumably hardened such that compromises could be detected, if not stopped altogether. But either way, what Nvidia\u2019s security team knew, and whether it could have acted on it, should become clearer as the board\u2019s independent investigation and federal inquiries proceed. <\/p>\n

In the meantime, Eftimiades said he hopes the whole episode is \u201ca wake-up call\u201d for U.S. industry, which he said is mostly \u201cclueless\u201d about China\u2019s tactics. \u201cWe have lost trillions [of dollars] in intellectual property,\u201d is his guess. \u201cWhatever we think we\u2019re doing isn\u2019t working.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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