11-9-2026 (Monday)
Hello, and welcome to The Intentional Brief - your weekly video update on the one big thing in cybersecurity for middle market companies, their investors, and executive teams.
I’m your host, Shay Colson, Managing Partner at Intentional Cybersecurity, and you can find us online at intentionalcyber.com.
Today is Monday, November 9, 2026, and we’ve had quite a week since we talked last. Obviously, lots of change - or at least indicators of a desire for change - and moving parts coming out of the election here in the US, but also some news about a personal indiscretion that might have global implications.
Insider Threats: Humans Are Silly
I’m talking, of course, about the absolute bombshell news that Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has admitted to carrying out an extramarital affair with Alice Huang (no relation), who is a suspected Chinese spy.
The implications, of course, reach far beyond Nvidia, but the Board has opened their own independent investigation, though it may be a case of too little, too late.
This isn’t news to some, however, with reports indicating that Secretary of State Marco Rubio circulated a memo this past Spring indicating that Jensen was in a “close relationship with a Chinese spy.”
The charge is that Alice Huang, “a Chinese citizen who was a senior executive at a Singapore-based company [Megaspeed] that was buying Nvidia’s advanced artificial intelligence chips and being investigated for illegally smuggling them into China.”
Others also had a sense, with noted short-seller Culper Research calling this out six months ago when they “theorized the China business that Nvidia lost to export controls had been rerouted through Southeast Asia, and that Megaspeed, a major chip buyer in the region, was secretly financed by Chinese tech giant Alibaba through shell companies. It pointed to financial records that showed Megaspeed’s total liabilities and equity had grown from $33 million at the end of 2023 to around $3 billion by the end of 2024, much of it in the form of refundable deposits from an unidentified source.”
This is, of course, yet another form of insider threat - where the CEO is convinced to make choices for reasons that may not be entirely in the interest of shareholders. Information - and chips, in this case - can be incredibly valuable and humans can be easily manipulated.
Leaving the personal implications out of it - but noting that Jensen’s net worth is north of $150B, and that his daughter Madison and son Spencer both hold senior-director level roles at Nvidia - these sort of insider threats can pop up through both people and proxies.
In fact, we saw a report from Layer3 Intel this week headlined “Residential Proxies Detected on White House Networks.” Why does this matter? The report notes:
“Most of the activity happens in the evening, Eastern time: about half of it falls between 5 p.m. and midnight, and almost none happens in the early morning. That pattern suggests a person rather than a public guest Wi-Fi network: someone regularly on the White House network late into the evening, whose device is infected with a proxy SDK. Our data shows the exits, not the device or the person behind them.
Past research has shown that poorly secured proxy SDKs can allow internal network access and lateral movement.”
In fact, this is really just another form of insider threat where either the machines on that network aren’t being managed well enough or the networks themselves are allowing non-managed machines to join, neither of which is great, considering the news on Jensen and China and our relationship with Russia.
To bring it back to your level, we spend a lot of time talking about “identity as the new edge” and securing those flows, but don’t forget that your machines, your network, or the machines on your network can all pose risks that are as large as your people. We don’t get a choice of which to secure, we have to cover them all off.
Even at the White House.
Fundraising
From a fundraising perspective, back to more grounded numbers this week with $5.8B in newly committed capital, led by:
I Squared Capital, who raised $3b for its second infrastructure credit fund.
The will they / won’t they continues for Anthropic - though I suspect we may see some Jensen reverberations there and with OpenAI. These stories get wilder and wilder as we race to year end. Hard to know what to focus on at any given time.
A reminder that you can find links to all the articles we covered below, find back issues of these videos and the written transcripts at intentionalcyber.com.
We’ll see you next week for another edition of the Intentional Brief.
Links
https://www.axios.com/2026/11/08/nvidia-ceo-jensen-huang-admits-affair-board-to-launch-investigation
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/nov/08/nvidia-jensen-huang-investigation
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/11/08/us/politics/rubio-nvidia-ceo-chinese-spy.html
https://layer3intel.com/blog/residential-proxies-white-house-network