Strategist · Security researcher · Media commentator · Keynote speaker · Multi-time C-level executive
That is what we should be asking of ourselves and of the world around us.
I've been inside the technology and security workings of companies for more than thirty years. I'm still on the inside, today.
Right now, that's as Chief Strategy and Chief Security Officer at Singulr AI. Behind that, two decades of C-level seats and several years as Global Head of Identity for JPMorgan Chase's Consumer Businesses.
The industry measures activity. Adversaries measure opportunity. Nobody prices the gap between the two, which is how three decades of rising budgets produced record losses and no scoreboard. I have been in the rooms where that gets explained away, and someone always pays for it. It is almost never anyone in the room.
I am not an expert. I am an archaeologist. I dig through what companies say they did, the breaches, the board decks, the controls nobody ever tested, and I report what I find. The dig site is active, and I am standing in it.
Three books came out of the digging. The newest is Built Wrong: Why Cybersecurity Keeps Failing and How We Can Rebuild It. I wrote it about my own house, and I still live in it. Every day.
Boards, executives, regulators
45 min keynote · cuts to 20
Three decades of rising spend and rising losses is not a technology failure. It is a measurement failure that everyone in the system was paid to leave in place. What a board should be asking instead, and what an honest answer sounds like.
Practitioners, architects, CISOs
45 min keynote · also runs as a workshop
The controls exist. They operate. They do not change the outcome they were deployed to influence. Why identity became the mechanism through which trust gets assigned, and why AI is now assigning it faster than anyone can review.
Practitioners, communities, early-career rooms
30–45 min · book signing optional
You have something important to say. How micro-fame actually works, how you can become a powerful voice in your community, and why influencers have been an important part of human culture for centuries.
I publish The Hacker in a Hoodie Index, a live record of what individual cyber incidents actually cost, and I have written three books. Famous With 12 People: How to Become an Internationally Recognized Expert In Something That Nobody Cares About is about becoming known in a field without asking anyone's permission. Built Wrong: Why Cybersecurity Keeps Failing and How We Can Rebuild It is about why the security industry keeps failing. The Verified Security Framework is the operating manual for it. It explains what measuring protection instead of activity would actually take.
All of it came from thirty years on the inside.
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