The head of the National Security Agency’s Cybersecurity Directorate will retire at the end of the month in another leadership shakeup at an agency reeling from the recent firing of its chief and mandated cuts to its workforce.
Dave Luber, who was named the NSA’s director of cybersecurity last year, will retire on May 30, according to three sources with knowledge of his decision. Luber, a 38-year NSA veteran, is taking advantage of the early retirement option being offered by the agency as it aims to shed 8 percent of its civilian staff to align with a larger effort by the Trump administration to shrink the federal government.
One of these sources, who like the others spoke on the condition of anonymity, said Luber’s deputy and the directorate’s chief operating officer are also leaving the agency.
The NSA declined to comment.
Recorded Future News first reported in February that the NSA had begun to offer employees options to leave their careers early as part of the Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE) deferred resignation initiative.
Luber, who most recently served as the directorate’s No. 2, helped push the spy agency to improve intelligence-sharing on digital threats and better collaborate with critical infrastructure operators and industry.
Just last month the NSA and other U.S. entities teamed up with international partners to issue an advisory about a threat called fast flux, an advanced technique used by state-sponsored hackers and cyber criminals to control infrastructure and evade detection.
The need for better public and private collaboration has only grown in the wake of sweeping Chinese digital campaigns that saw state-linked hackers burrow into critical infrastructure entities and telecommunication companies.
The activity, labeled as Volt Typhoon and Salt Typhoon respectively, fundamentally altered how the U.S. views Beijing’s hacking operations, shifting away from supporting intellectual property theft to pre-positioning inside of networks for potential warfare and traditional intelligence gathering.
China “demonstrated a new form of tradecraft and they’ve been caught in the act of using that tradecraft. But just because they’ve been caught doesn’t mean that they’re going to stop,” Luber told reporters at the RSA Conference in San Francisco last year.
“They’re going to continue to develop tradecraft and look for ways to even evade some of the hunt guides that we’ve put in place.”
Last month, Luber was withdrawn from giving the annual “State of the Hack” address at RSA. Cyber Command Executive Director Morgan Adamski and other federal officials also cancelled their appearances, just days after Cyber Command and NSA chief Timothy Haugh was fired.
Prior to becoming the third chief since the cyber directorate was established in 2019, Luber was Cyber Command’s executive director — the digital warfare organization’s third-in-command and the highest-ranking civilian post.
Among other roles over his nearly four decades in government, he served as the director of NSA Colorado and chief of the agency’s elite hacking unit, known as Tailored Access Operations.
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