How One Tribal Nation Built a Modern Cyber Defense with CrowdStrike

When Robby Jakovljevic, Director of IT for the Paskenta Band of Nomlaki Indians, received a call at 1:00 a.m. from CrowdStrike, he was still waking up as the team on the other end explained the situation. A sophisticated zero-day threat — China Chopper web shell — had been discovered on the tribe’s Microsoft Exchange server.

Before Jakovljevic could fully process the danger, the CrowdStrike Falcon® Complete Next-Gen MDR team had already isolated the server, removed the threat, and ensured the environment was safe. While other organizations scrambled to understand if they’d been breached, Paskenta was already in the clear.

For Jakovljevic, this was more than a cybersecurity win. It was a defining moment in a broader mission to protect Paskenta’s sovereignty, community, and culture. 

“We’re not just protecting data,” he said. “We’re protecting the very fabric of our nation. This isn’t an IT initiative. It’s a sacred responsibility.”

Jakovljevic’s passion for this work is deeply personal. Born in the former Yugoslavia, he witnessed war and the systematic erasure of culture, language, and history. That experience shapes his understanding of what Native American tribes have endured — and why modern threats against tribal infrastructure feel existential. 

“We are the digital custodians of our tribe’s legacy. If a threat actor attacks us, they’re threatening to erase our history,” he explained.

That mindset drives a security strategy built around purpose, not profit. Paskenta’s IT environment spans tribal government buildings, remote health clinics, and community centers all dispersed across rural Northern California. Connectivity is essential. So is resilience. Yet funding is limited, and every dollar invested in cybersecurity must be weighed against core services like healthcare and housing. Jakovljevic calls it “sacred money,” and that lens forces tough tradeoffs.

“We can’t outspend the problem,” he said. “We can’t build a 24/7 SOC or compete for elite security talent. Our strategy had to be different. It had to be smarter.”

That strategy began with visibility. Jakovljevic’s first move was to audit the environment and “turn the lights on” by running vulnerability scans, evaluating the network edge, and testing staff response to phishing simulations. What he found were three critical gaps: a workforce vulnerable to social engineering, a lack of insight into network behavior, and no clear plan for responding to an after-hours breach.

“It was terrifying,” he said. “We asked ourselves, ‘What would happen if an attack hit us at 2 a.m. on a Sunday?’ The honest answer was: we didn’t know.”

Paskenta needed a cybersecurity partner — not just a product. Jakovljevic ruled out tool sprawl and instead anchored his strategy on a unified platform and a team that could act as a true extension of tribal operations. That search led to CrowdStrike.

“CrowdStrike became the pillar of our cybersecurity program,” he said. “They gave us full visibility into what’s happening in our environment — not just alerts, but context and action. They don’t just tell us something’s wrong. They fix it.”

The transition was immediate and transformational. CrowdStrike Falcon® Identity Protection now monitors user behavior and detects lateral movement in real time. Falcon Complete Next-Gen MDR provides 24/7 managed protection backed by elite responders. And CrowdStrike Falcon® Next-Gen SIEM delivers speed, scale, and threat context that traditional logging tools can’t match. Across all of it, the tribal IT team gains time back to focus on strategic projects and community support.

The China Chopper incident proved that value, but it wasn’t the only one. When a new zero-day exploit targeting SharePoint servers emerged in 2025 — again, before Microsoft had issued a patch — CrowdStrike proactively protected Paskenta. While others waited for vendor updates, Paskenta was already secure.

For Jakovljevic, cybersecurity is about risk communication as much as risk reduction. To secure funding, he didn’t walk into a tribal council meeting with slides or acronyms. He told a story: one about a health clinic in another state that was paralyzed by ransomware after a social engineering attack. Doctors lost access to patient records. Pharmacies couldn’t fill prescriptions. Sensitive data was leaked. Families were left without care.

He made the problem real. Then he framed the options: absorb unacceptable risk, build an expensive and unsustainable internal team, or partner with a proven, always-on provider. “When you stop talking about software and start talking about sovereignty,” he said, “the conversation changes. It’s no longer an expense. It’s an obligation.”

That clarity of mission is why Paskenta continues to play an active role in tribal cybersecurity initiatives, including the Tribal-ISAC and TribalHub’s regional forums. Jakovljevic believes tribal nations must share threat intelligence and support each other. “Bad actors see us as a collective,” he said. “So we must defend as one.”

While Paskenta’s story is rooted in tribal governance, the lessons extend far beyond Indian Country. For small businesses, nonprofits, and public institutions navigating limited budgets, distributed workforces, and high-impact missions, the Paskenta model is a playbook in strategic defense.

“This was never about buying software,” Jakovljevic said. “It was about doing the right thing for our people. And CrowdStrike helps us do that — quietly, efficiently, and relentlessly.”