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The ITSPmagazine Podcast

The ITSPmagazine Podcast

By: ITSPmagazine Sean Martin Marco Ciappelli
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Founded in 2015, ITSPmagazine began as a vision for a publication positioned at the critical intersection of technology, cybersecurity, and society. What started as a written publication has evolved into a comprehensive repository for all their content—podcasts, articles, event coverage, interviews, videos, panels, and everything they create. This is where Sean Martin and Marco Ciappelli talk about cybersecurity, technology, society, music, storytelling, branding, conference coverage, and whatever else catches their attention. Over a decade of conversations exploring how these worlds collide, influence each other, and shape the human experience. This is where you'll find it all.© Copyright 2015-2026 ITSPmagazine, Inc. All Rights Reserved Politics & Government Social Sciences
Episodes
  • 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 mins
  • 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 mins
  • 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 mins
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