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  • We Made Everything Faster. We Never Defined Better. | Lens Four by Sean Martin | Read by TAPE9

    We Made Everything Faster. We Never Defined Better. | Lens Four by Sean Martin | Read by TAPE9
    Jul 1 2026
    ⬥EPISODE NOTES⬥ Almost every booth at Infosecurity Europe 2026 had settled on the same four words. Outcomes. Resilience. Sovereignty. Human in the loop. The messaging had grown up, more tempered than RSAC, more honest in its European register. The tell was quieter — almost none of it could connect those words to a definition of success a buyer could actually verify. Strip away the polish and the show floor was a working argument about what the cybersecurity market is for, at the exact moment the clock that governs it collapsed to seconds. The go-to-market caught up to the language. The capability did not. This is the prove-it problem, and it is worth pulling apart clearly. In this edition of Lens Four: 🔹 Why the quiet vocabulary convergence mattered more than any single product launch — outcomes, resilience, sovereignty, and human in the loop became the words everyone said, and almost none could tie them to a definition of success a buyer could verify 🔹 The number that should reorganize every SOC — the jump from initial access to the next stage collapsing from 8 hours to 22 seconds, with ransomware finishing in under an hour, most often on a Wednesday night 🔹 How Qualys reframed measurement itself — a client environment of 62 million risk findings cut to under 1% that could actually be executed, because the dashboard was never the deliverable, remediation was 🔹 Why Corelight put the same test on the detection itself — a black box tells you little, so keep the data behind every alert in the open and let an analyst prove what it actually is, the way one proof of value surfaced unencrypted sensitive traffic in 30 minutes 🔹 How Sumo Logic showed the repeatable version — prove a fix once, then let an agent apply that proven fix across 599 identical machines under human oversight, and its move into the AWS European Sovereign Cloud put something concrete under the week's sovereignty talk 🔹 What the criminal economy revealed as the honest mirror — an underground market for AI attack tools that went from 38 posts to over 1,400 in two months, tiered and redundant, an AI call center for hire that sounds like SaaS 🔹 Why the board's only real question, are we okay, now lands on the CISO as personal liability, just as AI moves from experimentation to deployment inside the organization 🔹 How consolidation and absorption are sorting the floor — 40-plus tools in silos, "make us relevant" becoming an executive hire, and the 12-to-18-month reckoning where AI absorbs functions that fill today's expo hall 🔹 The tell underneath all of it — when every booth converges on the same three or four words, the words stop doing the one job language has at a trade show: helping a buyer tell two things apart Fourth Lens: The vocabulary moved faster than the products underneath it. The industry repositioned around outcomes without ever defining the outcome, and the bill comes due over the next 12 to 18 months, not because AI arrives, but because AI removes the last place to hide the question. Naming the outcome was the easy part. Proving it repeats, across environments and teams and budgets that share nothing but the problem, is the part the vocabulary skipped. When the story can no longer be rounded up, are we okay, and can you prove it twice? 🥁 🎶 A very big THANK YOU to our Infosecurity Europe 2026 Full Coverage Sponsors: Corelight · Qualys · Sumo Logic 👏 👏 👏 ▶ Full article and references ▶ Full Infosecurity Europe 2026 coverage ▶ Subscribe to Lens Four ▶ Redefining CyberSecurity Podcast ▶ Music Evolves Podcast ▶ ITSPmagazine ▶ Studio C60 Sean Martin is a cybersecurity market analyst, content strategist, and go-to-market advisor with more than 30 years of experience across engineering, product development, marketing, and media. He is co-founder of ITSPmagazine and Studio C60, host of the Redefining CyberSecurity Podcast and Music Evolves Podcast, and co-host of On Location and Random and Unscripted. Learn more at seanmartin.com. Keywords: Infosecurity Europe 2026, cybersecurity go-to-market, security marketing, vendor positioning, machine-speed attacks, agentic AI, ransomware economics, post-quantum cryptography, boardroom liability, digital sovereignty, security tool consolidation, network detection and response, mean time to resolve, threat intelligence, resilience, Sean Martin, Lens Four Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
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    16 Min.
  • A Forrester Analyst on the Security Roles Coming Next — and What AI Makes Obsolete in Cybersecurity | A Conversation with Madelein van der Hout | On Location With Sean Martin And Marco Ciappelli — Infosecurity Europe 2026

    A Forrester Analyst on the Security Roles Coming Next — and What AI Makes Obsolete in Cybersecurity | A Conversation with Madelein van der Hout | On Location With Sean Martin And Marco Ciappelli — Infosecurity Europe 2026
    Jul 1 2026
    ON LOCATION | Sean Martin & Marco Ciappelli — Infosecurity Europe 2026 Two conferences, two moods: at RSA the drumbeat was resilience; at InfoSec, it's sovereignty. Sean and I close the week with Forrester analyst Madelein van der Hout — beaming in from the Netherlands — on why Europe makes a framework out of everything, what AI deployment is doing to the boardroom, and the security jobs that don't exist yet. 📺 Watch | 🎤 Listen | ITSPmagazine.com There's a building across the Thames from the InfoSecurity press room — Millennium Mills, a derelict flour mill that looks precisely as haunted as it sounds. I kept glancing at it while Sean and I talked with Madelein van der Hout, who this year was a kind of friendly ghost herself: fully in the conversation, quick as ever, and across the North Sea in the Netherlands. She couldn't make it to London this year. FOMO, she told us, is real. Which turned out to be the point. Madelein is a senior analyst at Forrester — she reads this industry for a living — so the first thing we did was compare notes on what the week actually felt like. Sean kept hearing one word on the show floor: sovereignty. A few weeks earlier at RSA in San Francisco, the drumbeat had been resilience. Same industry, two continents, two moods. Madelein said it better than I could: RSA is where her blood pumps with enthusiasm for everything technology can do, good and bad, and InfoSec is where she comes to get grounded in reality. Flashy versus pragmatic. The far edge of the possible versus the guardrails. Europe, she said with affection, will make a framework out of anything — the cloud sovereignty package announced that week being the newest one. And under all the frameworks sits the thing no European conference can avoid: hybrid warfare, close enough to feel. AI is moving from experimentation to deployment inside real organizations, and the moment it does, it stops being a demo and becomes a liability that lands on a boardroom. That, Madelein argued, is what you're feeling here — the weight of being responsible for something you've only just let inside the walls. Her research points somewhere specific: security is drifting toward becoming a "trust and assurance" function, and with it come jobs that don't exist yet. Trust engineers. Agentic workflow assurance engineers. People whose whole task is to confirm that an AI agent did what the business actually intended, not just what it was told. Sean's read was sharp: almost nothing on the expo floor addresses any of that. They're architecting for now, Madelein agreed, not for what's coming. Which is the oldest story in technology — we shout about the future and keep building for the present. Near the end we argued about metaphors, which is the kind of thing I live for. I reached for Frankenstein: all these tools and agents and smart-city systems stitched together into something we then have to teach to move as one. Madelein offered a better image. Don't build a Frankenstein, she said — become a jellyfish. There's a species that works as a neural network, and when two of them are injured and collide, they don't compete. They merge and swim on as a single organism. More than synergy, Sean said. Exactly. We spend enormous energy bolting parts together and calling it integration. Madelein is describing fusion instead of assembly — one organism, not a monster made of seams. She's already made her peace with what all this means for her own work. This job will be automated, she said, maybe most of it, and she cannot wait to help reinvent what an analyst even is. That was the healthiest thing I heard all week. Not "will AI take my job," but "what is this job becoming." So I'm watching a ghost mill through the rain while a colleague beams in from another country, and the question under all the frameworks and the shiny new job titles is quieter than any of them. When everything can be orchestrated, what still has to be human? Let's keep thinking. The full conversation is part of our On Location coverage of Infosecurity Europe 2026 at ITSPmagazine.com. For more of my writing, subscribe to the newsletter at marcociappelli.com. — Marco (with my co-host, Sean Martin) Co-Founder ITSPmagazine & Studio C60 | Creative Director | Branding & Marketing Advisor | Personal Branding Coach | Journalist | Writer | Podcast: An Analog Brain In A Digital Age ⚠️ Beware: Pigs May Fly | 🌎 LAX🛸FLR 🌍 More from our Infosecurity Europe 2026 coverage:Infosecurity Europe 2026 event coverageTechnology and cybersecurity conference coverage About the Hosts Marco Ciappelli is Co-Founder & CMO of ITSPmagazine, Co-Founder & Creative Director of Studio C60, and host of An Analog Brain In A Digital Age. Born in Florence and based in Los Angeles, he explores the intersection of technology, society, storytelling, and creativity. 🌎 marcociappelli.com Sean Martin is Co-Founder of ITSPmagazine and host of the Redefining CyberSecurity Podcast, where he ...
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    30 Min.
  • The Identity Gap Behind Nearly Every Breach | A Brand Spotlight Conversation with Kevin Surace, CEO of TokenCore

    The Identity Gap Behind Nearly Every Breach | A Brand Spotlight Conversation with Kevin Surace, CEO of TokenCore
    Jun 24 2026

    For most of the internet's life, proving identity has meant proving something you know or something you hold: a password, a code, a text message. Kevin Surace, CEO of TokenCore, argues that era is closing fast. As one of the people who helped invent the AI assistant at General Magic, he has a clear view of why the same technology now makes faces and voices simple to fake.

    Why isn't MFA enough? Because it protects a weak foundation. A decade-old paper mapped fifteen ways to defeat SMS codes, auth apps, and push approvals. Few attackers bothered with them until platforms like Salesforce and Microsoft made those methods mandatory. Now the attack has moved to where the door is.

    Surace walks through one of the common methods: an AI-written phishing email from a service you already trust, a PDF, and a pixel-perfect login page generated in moments. The credentials you enter relay to an attacker who is logging into the real site in real time. The push prompt asks if it is you, you approve, and the intruder is inside within minutes.

    The numbers back it up. Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 found that roughly ninety percent of successful intrusions over the past year involved hacked identity, almost all of them MFA or auth apps. The people compromised had privileged access, which means they had MFA in place.

    So what actually works? Surace makes the case for biometric-assured identity, a category Gartner projects growing into a twelve billion dollar market. TokenCore ties access to a fingerprint stored only on your device, the exact domain your account lives on, and physical proximity over a short-range wireless link. Look-alike domains never register, remote relays never get close enough, and the company never holds your biometric.

    The hardware comes as a ring, a portable, or a node about the size of an AirTag, and it is FIDO2 compatible, so it works with existing single sign-on. Most customers go passwordless once it is running. The reaction Surace hears most often from security leaders is that they can finally sleep at night.

    This is a Brand Spotlight. A Brand Spotlight is a ~15 minute conversation designed to explore the guest, their company, and what makes their approach unique. Learn more: https://www.studioc60.com/creation#spotlight

    GUEST

    Kevin Surace, Chief Executive Officer, TokenCore
    LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ksurace/

    RESOURCES

    Learn more about TokenCore: https://www.tokencore.com

    Are you interested in telling your story?
    ▶︎ Full Length Brand Story: https://www.studioc60.com/content-creation#full
    ▶︎ Brand Spotlight Story: https://www.studioc60.com/content-creation#spotlight
    ▶︎ Brand Highlight Story: https://www.studioc60.com/content-creation#highlight

    KEYWORDS

    Kevin Surace, TokenCore, Sean Martin, brand story, brand marketing, marketing podcast, brand spotlight, biometric assured identity, identity security, multi-factor authentication, MFA bypass, phishing resistant authentication, FIDO2, credential theft, passwordless, deepfake, AI security, account takeover, Unit 42, Gartner


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    20 Min.
  • Who Gets to Tell Your Story? Maggie Alphonsi on Strength, Resilience & Owning the Narrative | An Analog Brain In A Digital Age With Marco Ciappelli — On Location at Infosecurity Europe 2026

    Who Gets to Tell Your Story? Maggie Alphonsi on Strength, Resilience & Owning the Narrative | An Analog Brain In A Digital Age With Marco Ciappelli — On Location at Infosecurity Europe 2026
    Jun 23 2026
    A rugby World Cup winner walks into a room full of people who defend networks for a living. Maggie Alphonsi joins me to talk about breaking barriers, leading with your strengths, and what changed the day athletes stopped waiting for the back page and started telling their own stories. 📺 Watch | 🎤 Listen | marcociappelli.com Maggie Alphonsi has spent her life refusing to let other people decide who she is. She grew up on a north London council estate, born with a club foot, handed a stack of stereotypes she wanted no part of and surrounded, in her words, by people whose ambition pointed down instead of up. Then a PE teacher pointed her toward a rugby pitch, and she found the place where her strength was the whole point — where what her body could do mattered far more than how anyone thought it should look. That teacher didn't just change her life, she told me. She saved it, because the other road was right there and easy to take. I sat with Maggie at Infosecurity Europe 2026 — a Rugby World Cup winner speaking to a hall full of people who defend networks for a living. It sounds like a strange pairing until you hear her, and then it isn't strange at all. She wasn't there to explain rugby. She was there to talk about who gets to decide what your strengths are worth, which is a question the people in that room, many of them women in a field still run mostly by men, live with every day. My obsession, the thing this whole show keeps circling, is who holds the pen. For years women's sport got something like a tenth of one percent of media coverage — two sentences at the bottom of the back page, if that. Someone else decided whether you existed. Then the phone in everyone's pocket changed whose hand was on the pen. Maggie watched athletes start telling their own stories and building their own audiences with nobody's permission. She pointed to Ilona Maher, a rugby player now more famous around the world than almost any man in the game, famous because she controls her own narrative one post at a time. I love this, and I don't fully trust it, and neither does Maggie. The same platform that let her broadcast her strength also filled her feed with sexist garbage about a woman daring to commentate on men's rugby. She showed the crowd some of the worst of it, the misspelled cruelty, and then explained how she turns it into fuel. The tool is neutral. The hand on it is not. We talk about technology as the thing that amplifies a voice, and it does. But the voice itself — the strength, the scars, the single mother who worked herself to the bone, the years of being told to play it down — none of that is digital. It is as analog as a muddy pitch. Maggie has two books out now, an autobiography and one for kids who haven't found their sport yet, and both exist for the same reason she stood on that stage: so a young person reads a story and thinks, that could be me. We are all made of stories. I say it constantly, and this week a rugby player who learned it the hard way said it back to me. The technology decides how far a story travels. It still can't decide whether the story is worth telling. That part is ours. So before you hand your story to an algorithm to carry, it's worth asking who wrote it — and whether you'd recognize yourself in the version that comes back. Let's keep thinking. Maggie's books are linked below. And if you want more conversations like this one, subscribe to the newsletter at marcociappelli.com. — Marco Co-Founder ITSPmagazine & Studio C60 | Creative Director | Branding & Marketing Advisor | Personal Branding Coach | Journalist | Writer | Podcast: An Analog Brain In A Digital Age ⚠️ Beware: Pigs May Fly | 🌎 LAX🛸FLR 🌍 More from our Infosecurity Europe 2026 coverage:Infosecurity Europe 2026 event coverageTechnology and cybersecurity conference coverage About Marco Marco Ciappelli is Co-Founder & CMO of ITSPmagazine, Co-Founder & Creative Director of Studio C60, Branding & Marketing Advisor, Personal Branding Coach, Journalist, Writer, and Host of An Analog Brain In A Digital Age podcast. Born in Florence, Italy, and based in Los Angeles, he explores the intersection of technology, society, storytelling, and creativity — with an analog brain, in a digital age. 🌎 marcociappelli.com | itspmagazine.com | studioc60.com About the Guest Maggie Alphonsi MBE is one of the most influential figures in the history of women's rugby. A flanker for Saracens and England, she won 74 caps, helped England to seven consecutive Six Nations titles, and lifted the Women's Rugby World Cup in 2014. Born in London in 1983 and raised by her single mother of Nigerian heritage, she was born with club foot and overcame it to reach the top of a sport that wasn't built with her in mind. Nicknamed "Maggie the Machine," she was appointed MBE in 2012, named Sunday Times Sportswoman of the Year, became the first woman to win the Rugby Union Writers' Club Pat Marshall Award, and was inducted into the ...
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    16 Min.
  • When You Can't Trust the Face on the Call | A Brand Highlight Conversation with Kevin Surace, CEO of TokenCore

    When You Can't Trust the Face on the Call | A Brand Highlight Conversation with Kevin Surace, CEO of TokenCore
    Jun 24 2026

    In this Brand Highlight, Kevin Surace, CEO of TokenCore, catches up on a market that has accelerated faster than even his team expected. Biometric-assured identity has gone from the fringes to the core, and the clearest example is the video call: on Zoom or Teams, there is often no reliable way to know whether the person on screen is real, human, or an AI avatar. Surace points to cases where employees wired money because a synthetic version of their boss appeared to ask for it.

    That risk is pushing the work outward. Beyond using TokenCore internally, the larger banks are asking how to extend biometric assurance to the customers who move wires, because a phone call no longer confirms who is actually on the line. The goal is to know that it is the right person, on the right domain, within a few feet of the device, and not someone operating from another country.

    For security leaders, Surace offers direct advice: start moving off MFA and authenticator apps now, since those methods are being compromised constantly. He acknowledges the change is hard, often for cultural reasons more than technical ones, and suggests starting with admins and the people who touch real data before expanding over roughly a year. The upside, he notes, is that employees tend to welcome it, going passwordless or even ID-less and logging into tools like Salesforce in under two seconds.

    This is a Brand Highlight. A Brand Highlight is a ~5 minute conversation that captures a focused idea, update, or perspective from the guest. Learn more: https://www.studioc60.com/creation#highlight

    GUEST

    Kevin Surace, Chief Executive Officer, TokenCore
    LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ksurace/

    RESOURCES

    Learn more about TokenCore: https://www.tokencore.com

    Are you interested in telling your story?
    ▶︎ Full Length Brand Story: https://www.studioc60.com/content-creation#full
    ▶︎ Brand Spotlight Story: https://www.studioc60.com/content-creation#spotlight
    ▶︎ Brand Highlight Story: https://www.studioc60.com/content-creation#highlight

    KEYWORDS

    Kevin Surace, TokenCore, Sean Martin, brand story, brand marketing, marketing podcast, brand highlight, biometric assured identity, identity security, deepfake, AI avatar, video call security, MFA, passwordless, FIDO2, CISO, account takeover, wire fraud, Zoom security, identity assurance


    Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
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    6 Min.
  • Call It What It Is: When Ransomware Becomes Terrorism | An Interview with Cynthia Kaiser | Redefining CyberSecurity With Sean Martin — On Location at InfoSecurity Europe 2026

    Call It What It Is: When Ransomware Becomes Terrorism | An Interview with Cynthia Kaiser | Redefining CyberSecurity With Sean Martin — On Location at InfoSecurity Europe 2026
    Jun 19 2026
    A ransomware crew can run through your whole company between dinner and dessert. Sean Martin sat down with Cynthia Kaiser — twenty years at the FBI, now leading the Halcyon Ransomware Research Center — on the speed of the threat, the human cost the industry keeps abstracting away, and why a slice of ransomware deserves a harder name than “crime.” 📺 Watch | 🎙️ Listen | seanmartin.com Put your phone face-down at dinner on a Wednesday. Pick it up an hour later. In that time, an entire ransomware attack can have run through your company, start to finish. Wednesday is the favorite, Cynthia Kaiser told Sean Martin at InfoSecurity Europe, because the crews want you to walk in Thursday morning and find it. The fastest groups now go from break-in to full encryption in about four hours, sometimes under one. Humans do not move at that speed. The machines attacking us do. Kaiser knows the tempo. She spent twenty years at the FBI, finishing as Deputy Assistant Director of its Cyber Division, and now runs the Ransomware Research Center at Halcyon. She has watched this threat from the side of the government that hunts it and the industry that sells against it, and the thing she most wants to pass along has nothing to do with technique. We should all be angrier about cybercrime than we are. Her reason is the part the industry keeps abstracting away. We picture cybercrime as something that happens on a keyboard, to a network, to a number. Kaiser saw the other end of it: more than seventy-five thousand sextortion cases reported in the US in a single year, over twenty billion dollars in losses, and in one case thirty-eight victims referred to support services over the risk of suicide. The damage does not stay on the screen. It walks into homes. When a ransomware crew steals a hospital’s files and then phones the patients directly, or calls a CEO to say they will burn his house down, Kaiser stops calling it crime. Those are predators, she says, people who know they are endangering lives and have decided it is someone else’s problem. There is an older word for that, and the word is terrorism. Most ransomware is ordinary crime. A slice of it is not, and she argues we should name that slice honestly instead of filing it under a tidy technical category. Naming matters, because the other side is organized like a business, and lately like a software company. Kaiser’s team watched the market for criminal AI tools jump from thirty-eight forum posts in December to more than fourteen hundred two months later. Free tiers, paid upgrades for power users, the same tool mirrored across platforms for resilience. The technical people refine the product on the forums, then it graduates to the Telegram channels for buyers who could not build it themselves. Software-as-a-service, sold to extortionists. The product that should worry you most is an AI call center. No humans involved, a hundred and twenty simultaneous calls in different languages, complete with simulated keyboard clicks so it sounds like a real office. Voice cloning now needs about three seconds of audio, which is enough to become your CEO on the phone. Kaiser’s advice is blunt: no voice on a call, however convincing, should ever grant access on its own. Sean kept pulling the thread back to a point my own conversation with Geoff White had raised a day earlier, the line between locking data and stealing it to extort. The same crews do both, Kaiser said, and a few have moved somewhere worse, into the place with the phone calls and the threats. There are no borders in cyberspace, which is why her proudest moments were joint operations like the LockBit takedown, the FBI and the UK’s National Crime Agency working as one. So what do we carry forward, and what do we leave behind? We carry the anger Kaiser is asking for, and the discipline of calling harm by its real name. We leave behind the comfortable fiction that any of this happens only on a keyboard. Sean’s full conversation with Cynthia Kaiser is linked below, with the rest of our InfoSecurity Europe coverage. Let’s keep thinking. — Marco Co-Founder ITSPmagazine & Studio C60 | Creative Director | Branding & Marketing Advisor | Journalist | Writer | On Location With Sean Martin And Marco Ciappelli | 🌎 LAX🛸FLR 🌍 About the Host Sean Martin, CISSP, is the co-founder and Director of Operations and Programming at ITSPmagazine, and the host of the Redefining CyberSecurity podcast. An information security and technology veteran of more than thirty years and a multiple-time CISSP, he led engineering and delivery for hundreds of cybersecurity products before turning to journalism and broadcasting. Through Redefining CyberSecurity he keeps pressing one question: if we are selling security insincerely, buying it indiscriminately, and deploying it ineffectively, how do we make it usable, honest, and a real source of business value? He teaches at Pepperdine’s Graziadio Business School and broadcasts ...
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    16 Min.
  • Technology Got Safer, But The Smartest Hackers Don't Hack. They Just Ask | An Interview with Lee Clark | An Analog Brain In A Digital Age With Marco Ciappelli — On Location at Infosecurity Europe 2026

    Technology Got Safer, But The Smartest Hackers Don't Hack. They Just Ask | An Interview with Lee Clark | An Analog Brain In A Digital Age With Marco Ciappelli — On Location at Infosecurity Europe 2026
    Jun 20 2026
    PODCAST EPISODE | An Analog Brain In A Digital Age With Marco Ciappelli — On Location at Infosecurity Europe 2026 The most dangerous attacks at Infosecurity Europe 2026 weren't the high-tech ones. Lee Clark of the Retail & Hospitality ISAC sits down with me to explain why the soft target is still a human being — a help desk, a new hire, a phone ringing at dinner — and what stays in our hands as the shopper quietly becomes an algorithm. 📺 Watch | 🎤 Listen | marcociappelli.com The phone rings while my parents are eating dinner, and before anyone reaches for it, I already know what I'll say. Probably a scammer. Let it ring. I have trained them the way you train a reflex, a small Pavlovian flinch every time the landline interrupts a meal. My grandmother's generation thought letting a phone ring was unforgivably rude. Mine has learned the rudeness is now on the other end of the line. I was thinking about that flinch when I sat down with Lee Clark at Infosecurity Europe 2026. Lee runs threat intelligence production for the Retail & Hospitality ISAC, the place where the companies holding your loyalty points, your hotel bookings, and your checkout data come together to compare notes on who is coming after them. His job, stripped down, is translation: he takes the hash-value, log-source world of the analysts and turns it into something a board can act on. And the thing he kept returning to was not some exotic piece of malware. The two threats his member companies report most often need almost no code at all. One is a phone call. A criminal rings the help desk, says he's an employee who needs his multi-factor authentication reset, gets it, and walks in through the front door. Scattered Spider, ShinyHunters, the loose crew they call the Com: names that sound like a heist movie and behave like one. The other is a fake résumé, North Korean operatives tracked as Famous Chollima, taking remote IT jobs at Western firms under invented identities. No hoodie, no broken encryption. People, lying to people, about who they are. You can stop a lot of fraud by adding multi-factor authentication at the checkout page, and by adding that one step, you measurably reduce sales. So the business sits forever between wanting you safe and wanting you to keep buying, and security tends to arrive last, patching armor onto a machine already built for speed. Lock a light switch inside a box, Lee said, and eventually the person who needs the light just takes a hammer to it. We have been handing each other hammers for years. Then we went where these conversations now always go. What happens when the shopper is no longer a person but an agent, an AI buying the paper towels so I don't have to? Agent negotiating with agent at the checkout, at machine speed, no human flinch anywhere in the loop. Maybe that is more secure. Or maybe it is a new doorway, where instead of fooling a tired employee you simply ask the agent, politely, to send the payment somewhere else. What I carry out of that room is this. For thirty years we have been promised that the next layer of technology will finally take security off our hands. Lee doesn't believe it, and after this week, neither do I. The human stays in the loop, as the target, yes, but also as the one still able to feel that something is wrong. My parents' flinch at the dinner table is not a flaw in some outdated analog brain. It is the brain doing precisely what no checkout page can do for them. We keep trying to automate away the part of us that hesitates. Lee spends his days proving that the hesitation is the defense. So the question I'm left with is not whether the machines will protect us. It's whether we hold on to the part of ourselves that still knows when to hang up. Let's keep thinking. The full conversation is on video, audio, and in the newsletter at marcociappelli.com. — Marco Co-Founder ITSPmagazine & Studio C60 | Creative Director | Branding & Marketing Advisor | Personal Branding Coach | Journalist | Writer | Podcast: An Analog Brain In A Digital Age ⚠️ Beware: Pigs May Fly | 🌎 LAX🛸FLR 🌍 More from our Infosecurity Europe 2026 coverage:Infosecurity Europe 2026 event coverageTechnology and cybersecurity conference coverage About Marco Marco Ciappelli is Co-Founder & CMO of ITSPmagazine, Co-Founder & Creative Director of Studio C60, Branding & Marketing Advisor, Personal Branding Coach, Journalist, Writer, and Host of An Analog Brain In A Digital Age podcast. Born in Florence, Italy, and based in Los Angeles, he explores the intersection of technology, society, storytelling, and creativity — with an analog brain, in a digital age. 🌎 marcociappelli.com | itspmagazine.com | studioc60.com About the Guest Lee Clark is Cyber Threat Intelligence Production Manager at the Retail & Hospitality ISAC (RH-ISAC), the information sharing and analysis center for consumer-facing industries — retail, hospitality, airlines, quick- and full-service restaurants, loyalty ...
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    18 Min.
  • Cybersecurity Leadership Is a People Problem, Not a Technology Problem | A Redefining CyberSecurity Podcast Conversation with Tera Ladner, Deputy Global Chief Information Security Officer of Aflac

    Cybersecurity Leadership Is a People Problem, Not a Technology Problem | A Redefining CyberSecurity Podcast Conversation with Tera Ladner, Deputy Global Chief Information Security Officer of Aflac
    Jun 19 2026
    ⬥EPISODE NOTES⬥ What does it take to lead a 200-person security organization without coming up through the technical ranks? Tera Ladner, Deputy Global Chief Information Security Officer at Aflac, answers that question by describing a path that runs through information management, e-discovery, and a law degree before it ever reaches the security org chart. The result is a leader who looks at a program through the lens of controls, evidence, and defensibility, and who treats security as a people problem before a technology one. Host Sean Martin and Tera Ladner dig into what that orientation changes in practice. Rather than opening a stakeholder conversation with controls or threats, Tera Ladner starts by listening: what are the business goals, and how does security enable them? Working inside an insurance company helps, because risk is already the shared language of every leader in the building. The job, as she frames it, is translation, turning a technical event into a business and resiliency impact that the people who own the decisions can actually act on. The conversation turns to hiring and team building, where Tera Ladner names curiosity as the first trait she screens for, the instinct to ask the second, third, and fourth question until the real problem surfaces. From there she argues for a broader "tool belt": storytelling, relationship building, influence without authority, and the ability to navigate ambiguity, a skill she sees tested daily as boards and technology leaders press for answers on frontier AI. Technical skills alone, she suggests, were enough years ago and are not enough now. Culture sits at the center of how she leads. "Your team lives in the house that you build," she tells her people leaders, and she describes the team norms, transparency, integrity, and care, that hold a security organization together in the hard moments. That same relationship-first instinct extends outward, to a seat at the executive table that has to be earned by giving stakeholders a seat at yours, and downward into the talent pipeline through Aflac's Cyber Inspire and Empower Girls programs, which grew from 200 girls in their first local year to 815 in the second. For security and risk leaders, the throughline is hard to miss: the future of the field depends less on finding more technologists and more on building leaders who can listen, translate, and bring people who never saw themselves in cyber to the table. ⬥GUEST⬥ Tera Ladner, Deputy Global Chief Information Security Officer at Aflac On LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/teraladner/ ⬥HOST⬥ Sean Martin, Co-Founder at ITSPmagazine, Studio C60, and Host of Redefining CyberSecurity Podcast & Music Evolves Podcast | Website: https://www.seanmartin.com/ ⬥RESOURCES⬥ Aflac: https://www.aflac.com/ Cyber Inspire and Empower Girls (Aflac community programs introducing students and seniors to cybersecurity): https://www.linkedin.com/company/cyberinspire The Future of Cybersecurity Newsletter: https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/7108625890296614912/ More Redefining CyberSecurity Podcast episodes: https://www.seanmartin.com/redefining-cybersecurity-podcast Redefining CyberSecurity Podcast on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLnYu0psdcllS9aVGdiakVss9u7xgYDKYq ⬥ADDITIONAL INFORMATION⬥ 🎙️ Redefining CyberSecurity Podcast: https://www.seanmartin.com/redefining-cybersecurity-podcast 📺 ITSPmagazine on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@itspmagazine 📰 The Future of Cybersecurity Newsletter: https://itspm.ag/future-of-cybersecurity 🌐 Connect with Sean Martin: https://www.seanmartin.com/ ⬥KEYWORDS⬥ tera ladner, aflac, sean martin, cybersecurity leadership, security culture, risk management, ciso leadership, women in cybersecurity, cybersecurity careers, non-traditional cybersecurity paths, building security teams, security as business enabler, cybersecurity talent pipeline, redefining cybersecurity, cybersecurity podcast, redefining cybersecurity podcast Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
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    32 Min.