Cyber Defense: Walter Raquet of Symmatrics On The 5 Things Every American Business Leader Should Do To Shield Themselves From A Cyberattack

Cyber Defense Magazine — In our uncertain and turbulent world, cyberattacks on private businesses are sadly a common tactic of hostile foreign regimes as well as criminal gangs. Cyberattacks and ransomware have crippled large multinational organizations and even governments. What does every company need to do to protect itself from a cyberattack?

In this series called "5 Things Every American Business Leader Should Do To Shield Themselves From A Cyberattack” we are talking to cybersecurity experts and chief information security officers who can share insights from their experience, with all of us. As a part of this series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Walter Raquet.

Walter Raquet is the Chairman and CEO of Symmatrics™, a cybersecurity company built to replace the cryptographic foundation of the internet for the quantum era. Over a four-decade career, he co-founded Knight Capital — which grew into one of the largest market makers in U.S. equities — and led at the intersection of finance, trading technology, and national-security identity systems as Chairman of Cross Match Technologies. He is the author of The Last Encryption, a plain-language guide to why today’s encryption is failing and what comes next.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you. Can you tell us a bit about how you grew up?

Igrew up in Cambria Heights, in the borough of Queens. My dad was a fireman, and my mom was a secretary. I started working at age 7, selling Christmas and other greeting cards door to door. Eventually, I expanded into selling wedding invitations, calendars, and other promotional items. When I was in my teens, I was able to make $100 on Saturdays in October selling engraved Christmas cards.

I received a full scholarship to NYU’s School of Commerce, where I majored in accounting. One of my professors, Ely Kuschel, arranged for me to work as a bookkeeper at Alcon Litho for $3.00 per hour. After two months, I came up with an idea that increased the company’s profits by $5,000 per month, and he raised my pay to $5.00 per hour. Shortly after that, I discovered another way to increase profits, and he raised my compensation to $10.00 per hour. This was in 1964, when $10.00 per hour was the equivalent of $20,000 per year.

I graduated near the top of my class and received offers from the top eight CPA firms. I chose Price Waterhouse and became a CPA.

Is there a particular story that inspired you to pursue a career in cybersecurity? We’d love to hear it.

I met the two founders of Symmatrics, who had spent a combined 53 years at the NSA, in June 2022. They had been trying to bring One-Time Pad Symmetric Key technology to the supply chain since 2016 but were struggling. After three hours, I realized that they had the solution to cybercrime.

Within one week, they made me Chairman, and we became a cybersecurity company. We raised $15 million and have finished developing a Key Distribution Center (KDC) and our VPN alternative, which we call QPN (Quantum Virtual Network™). The KDC uses standard equipment — up to four Quantum Random Number Generators and two Blade Servers — and, combined with our software, can generate trillions of true random numbers, store billions, and distribute millions per second. Our QPN™ can secretly and securely transmit transactions, data files, emails, cell calls, and texts over the internet.

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began this fascinating career?

The most well-known was co-founding Knight Capital, which we grew from $17 million and 60 employees to 1,400 employees, $300 million of EBITDA, and an $8 billion market cap in less than four years.

But history will remember me and the team at Symmatrics for the KDC, which first generated and distributed keys at scale, and for our QPN. The significance of this discovery is that it will prevent World War III — a war that would begin when China, Russia, Iran, or North Korea try to take down the US and its allies’ key infrastructure via a cyber attack. Symmatrics will be remembered as the company that made the internet safe.

You are a successful leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?

Trust, Respect, and Communication! These are the essential traits that can make a company successful. You must be able to trust the people in your organization and respect them. It is critical that you communicate clearly and firmly with all team members. Teamwork makes the dream work.

Conviction ahead of consensus. I’ve made a habit of acting on ideas before the market agreed they mattered. Two talented programmers and I brought electronic trading to a paper-based industry in the 1980s. The system, called COLT, was sold to 21 of the 30 largest stock-trading firms globally.

Comfort with responsibility for other people’s trust. I’ve never been able to treat that responsibility casually, and I think that’s served me well.

The instinct to replace rather than patch. It’s the same instinct behind Symmatrics: we’re not patching the old model — we’re replacing it.

Are you working on any exciting new projects now? How do you think that will help people?

Yes — and I’d argue it’s the most important work of my career, because it sits underneath almost everything people do online.

Nearly all the encryption protecting the internet today relies on public-key cryptography. In plain terms, everything we do — and everyone’s privacy — rests on the assumption that certain math problems underpinning today’s encryption are too hard to solve quickly. That assumption is about to fail. AI is widening the attack surface every month, and quantum computing will eventually make that hard math trivial. When that day comes, “Q-Day”, everything encrypted under today’s model is exposed — and adversaries know it, which is why they’re capturing encrypted data right now and simply waiting for the key to unlock it later.

At Symmatrics, we’re not improving the old standard. We’re replacing it. We’ve built and patented a way to deliver one-time pad encryption — the method the intelligence and defense communities have trusted for more than 50 years, long proven to be mathematically unbreakable when implemented correctly — at internet scale for the first time. Using the one-time pad was never the problem, scaling it was: its limitation was that keys had to be delivered physically, by courier. We solved the delivery problem. We’ve also moved the model from long-lived cryptographic trust to what we call Continuously Expiring Trust™ — so even if data is intercepted, what an adversary captures is worthless, today and in the quantum era.

What excites me most is that this isn’t just for cybersecurity experts. The same architecture protects a personal bank transfer, a private message, a family member’s medical records, a company’s email. Healthcare is consistently the most breached industry in the world, and once a patient’s data is exposed, it can never truly be made private again. We can stop that — and just this month we put real products behind the thesis, launching our Quantum Protected Network™ and publishing our short e-book The Last Encryption so the argument is in the open, not locked in a lab.

For the benefit of our readers, can you briefly tell our readers why you are an authority about the topic of Cybersecurity?

My whole career has lived at the intersection of technology and trust — and cybersecurity is what sits at the center of both.

I’ve had the rare luck of seeing security from four different chairs. As corporate controller at PaineWebber, one of Wall Street’s major firms, I helped uncover and shut down a significant financial fraud alongside the U.S. Treasury and the IRS — my first real lesson in what happens when people exploit the trust a system depends on. In the 1980s, I helped bring some of the first sophisticated electronic trading technology to an industry still running largely on paper. I later co-founded Knight Capital, which grew into the largest market maker in U.S. equities — infrastructure where security and reliability weren’t features, they were the entire business. And as Chairman of Cross Match Technologies, a biometric identity company serving government, military, and law enforcement, I worked at the heart of identity and national security.

Seeing the problem as a financial operator, a technologist, an entrepreneur, and from the national-security side is what shaped how I think today. I’ve come to believe cybersecurity isn’t only a technical problem — it’s a question of where trust lives, and what happens when the assumptions underneath it quietly stop being true. That’s the perspective I try to bring.

Ok super. Thank you for all that. Let’s now shift to the main focus of our interview. In order to ensure that we are all on the same page let’s begin with some simple definitions. Can you tell our readers about the different forms of cyber attacks that we need to be cognizant of?

Sure. “Cyberattack” is an umbrella over dozens of separate threats, so let me group them. There’s malware and ransomware — malicious software that locks up or steals your data. There’s phishing and its cousins, spear-phishing, vishing, and smishing — tricking a person into handing over information or access. There are denial-of-service attacks that flood a system until it collapses. There are man-in-the-middle attacks, where someone quietly intercepts data moving between two parties. And there are credential attacks, where stolen passwords let an adversary walk in the front door.

But here’s the part that gets lost, and it’s the most important thing I can tell your readers: the overwhelming majority of these attacks succeed the same way. They don’t break the encryption — they steal the key. Reused credentials, stolen passwords, intercepted data: the common thread beneath ransomware, phishing, and nearly every breach you read about is that someone obtained the key. By some measures, roughly 95% of breaches trace back to that same handful of attack surfaces. So I’ve come to believe the real vulnerability isn’t any single type of attack — it’s that the entire system depends on long-lived secrets that can be stolen in the first place. Take away the long-lived secret, and most of these attacks have nothing left to steal.

Who has to be most concerned about a cyber attack? Is it primarily businesses or even private individuals?

The biggest threat is to the United States and its allies. With the advent of AI and the arrival of quantum computing, the US and its allies could be subject to a cyber war orchestrated by China, Russia, Iran, or North Korea. With quantum, they would all have the ability to shut down our entire electrical grid, which would throw our country and the countries of our allies into chaos. We are fortunate that Symmatrics has the solution to prevent this world war from starting. It is imperative that the US government and its allies work with Symmatrics to prevent this war from coming to fruition. The concern to businesses and private individuals is small compared to the attacks that could take place against the nation.

What are the most common data security and cybersecurity mistakes you have seen companies make that make them vulnerable to ransomware attacks?

Overarchingly, asymmetric technology, which we have used for the past 50–60 years, has been vulnerable to many attacks, including stolen passwords and user IDs, and intercepted data on VPNs. The best evidence for this is the $10T cyber crime industry, rising to $30T within a couple years. In addition, the advent of AI has given cybercriminals a brand-new tool to exploit governments, companies, and individuals on the internet. The only solution that we know of is to switch to a commercially available symmetric key technology at scale, which is what Symmatrics has developed for the first time.

Another common mistake includes treating security as something you buy rather than something you architect — assuming that because you have tools in place, you’re protected.

Additionally, we keep coming back to: passwords, reused credentials, and long-lived keys. Ransomware crews don’t usually break in by force; they log in with credentials someone handed them through a phishing email.

But underneath all of this is one mistake: building on long-lived secrets and hoping no one steals them. At Knight Capital, with billions of dollars moving through the system, I couldn’t afford a single weak spot — the system had to be fortified every single time, not most of the time. Business leaders need to think about their data the same way. A Band-Aid is no longer the answer.

What would you recommend for the government or for tech leaders to do to help limit the frequency and severity of these attacks?

I recommend that the government and tech leaders learn about Symmatrics’ symmetric key distribution technology to drastically reduce cybercrime in the coming years.

What are the “5 Things Every American Business Leader Should Do To Shield Themselves From A Cyberattack” and why? (Please share a story or example for each.)

First and foremost, readers need to understand one thing: the existing form of encryption for the entire world and digital economy is about to be rendered obsolete by quantum computers, and an enormous transformation in cybersecurity is warranted and underway. Symmatrics solved this problem: Quantum computing will destroy the public key infrastructure — all asymmetric encryption. The world needs to adopt one-time pad symmetric key encryption, which is the only mathematically unbreakable form of encryption regardless of computing power. One- Time Pad is the foundation of our Symmatrics solutions and, thankfully, it is easy, fast, and affordable to integrate alongside existing infrastructure without a rip-and-replace. If enterprises and governments adopt Symmatrics’ technology, which prevents the majority of cyberattacks, all other patchwork systems will be unnecessary.

Complementing the critically important migration from asymmetric to symmetric encryption are several best practices:

1. Treat a cyberattack as a certainty, not a possibility.

Throughout my career I’ve watched leaders understand the severity of cyber risk but underestimate its likelihood. They treat it like a flood or a fire — a disaster that probably won’t hit them. The numbers say otherwise: cybercrime is now a multi-trillion-dollar economy, and roughly 95% of breaches trace back to the same handful of attack surfaces. When I helped expose one of the largest tax frauds in US history, what struck me wasn’t the sophistication — it was the confidence officials had that the system was sound. Confidence in a system is not the same as the system being sound. Every leader should assume they’re already a target and lead accordingly.

2. Understand what your encryption actually protects — and what it doesn’t.

Encryption isn’t a box you check, and it isn’t a cure-all. Traditional asymmetric encryption protects data while it’s sitting still or moving between points, but it can leave data exposed while it’s actually being used. Worse, today’s legacy systems rest on math problems that were hard in 1995 and are becoming trivial in the age of quantum. Adversaries know it. They’re capturing encrypted data now and stockpiling it to decrypt later. Don’t just ask “Are we encrypted?” Ask how you can integrate our mathematically unbreakable symmetric encryption into your tech stacks to prepare for tomorrow’s threat landscape.

3. Make decisions for the quantum era now.

The quantum era isn’t a distant threat; it’s arriving, and it’s already reshaping how serious organizations plan. I’ve spent my career acting on ideas before the market knew it needed them, and the pattern never changes: the ones who win act when the threat is on the horizon, not when it’s overhead. The encryption the entire internet runs on was never designed to withstand quantum computing. Leaders who file this under “a few years from now” are missing that the data being quietly stolen today is exactly what gets decrypted then.

When you realize you need a new solution to protect all your data, emails, calls, records, and internet transmissions in the AI and Quantum Eras, call me. That’s what Symmatrics does, and we’re the only ones in the world who do it.

4. Compliance is a floor, not a ceiling.

Too many leaders approve a big security budget, satisfy the audit, and assume they’re safe. Compliance means you’ve met the standard for known threats — it doesn’t mean you’re protected. In biometric identity and national security, I learned the deadliest gap in any organization is the distance between “we have a system in place” and “the system actually works.” Push your team and your vendors past the checkbox. Ask not if but when there’s a breach: what actually happens to your data, and what does it mean for your operations and pocketbook?

5. Security belongs in the boardroom as much as the server room.

I see too many major security decisions made too far down the org chart — delegated to IT and ignored by leadership until it’s too late. CEOs and boards don’t need to become cryptographers, but they need to understand the stakes well enough to ask the right questions and fund the right answers. The companies getting this right don’t treat security as a cost center; they treat it as a strategic advantage and a matter of survival. That shift — from technicality to leadership priority — is one of the most important moves a business can make.

You are a person of enormous influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)

Read my free eBook, entitled The Last Encryption, which clearly and concisely outlines the solution for the future of preventing most cyberattacks.

How can our readers further follow your work online?

Readers can visit Symmatrics.com to follow our work, connect with Symmatrics and me on LinkedIn, and download my book, The Last Encryption, for free. I wrote it for anyone who wants to understand what digital security really means in the quantum era — where it’s heading, and why this moment matters so much for the entire digital global economy. It’s written for people, not cryptographers.

This was very inspiring and informative. Thank you so much for the time you spent with this interview!

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