The ITSPmagazine Podcast

The security industry has spent years debating which tools to buy. Impetum is asking a different question: are the tools you already have actually working? Founded by incident responders who saw the same failures across hundreds of breaches, Impetum built the Persistent Purple Team platform to simulate advanced threat actors inside customer environments on a continuous monthly basis -- not as a one-time engagement, but as an ongoing relationship built around real data, custom TTPs, and a measurable Threat Resilience Score.

Matt Stewart and Alex Grohmann spoke with Sean Martin and Marco Ciappelli at RSAC Conference 2026 about...

Arkose Labs sits at the intersection of bot management, fraud prevention, and identity protection -- working with the world's largest consumer-facing brands to make fraud unprofitable. Frank Teruel walks through how the threat landscape shifted from nation-state actors and organized crime to fully democratized crime-as-a-service platforms, where MFA bypass kits are sold online and multi-billion dollar fraud operations run with the efficiency of a product company.

The conversation covers three of the biggest attack categories hitting organizations today: SMS toll fraud, bonus abuse, and fake account registrations. Each one exploits legitimate business flows -- onboarding, loyalty programs...

At RSAC Conference 2026, the floor at Moscone Center was buzzing with talk of AI -- but underneath the excitement, a sharper question was forming: are enterprises actually ready to secure the AI systems they are rushing to deploy? Ed Wright, VP of Product Marketing at Menlo Security, joined Sean Martin on-site to dig into exactly that question. With 85 percent of knowledge workers now operating primarily through a browser, Menlo Security has spent 13 years building the infrastructure to protect that surface -- and the threat landscape has just taken a significant turn.

The traditional browser threat model centers...

Most enterprise authentication today is still built on passwords or one-time codes -- and neither is phishing-resistant. Alexander Summerer explains that fraud remains the core challenge: attackers intercept credentials in the online channel, and users are burdened with complex password policies that slow them down without making them safer. Swissbit's answer is the iShield Key, a FIDO2-based hardware security key that is plug and play. No passwords to remember, no codes to intercept, and no chance for a phishing attack to succeed.

What sets Swissbit apart at RSAC Conference 2026 is convergence. The same iShield Key that...

Most organizations are not cloud-only and, according to Thyaga Vasudevan, EVP, Product at Skyhigh Security, they are unlikely to become cloud-only anytime soon. Legacy on-prem applications, new AI workloads kept inside the firewall, and the growing cost of routing all enterprise traffic through a cloud proxy are pushing organizations toward a hybrid security architecture -- one that needs to enforce consistent policy regardless of where the traffic goes or where the data lives.

Skyhigh Security announced three major innovations at RSAC Conference 2026: a next-generation SSE hybrid platform with a single console managing on-prem and cloud enforcement under...

In the middle of a major incident, security teams face a brutal paradox: the faster things move, the harder it becomes to capture what's actually happening. Cydarm Technologies was built to solve exactly that. Vaughan Shanks, Co-Founder and CEO, describes the platform as a system of record for the SOC -- a purpose-built case management tool that captures who knew what, when, and why, in real time, throughout the lifecycle of an incident.

Most of Cydarm's customers sit in government, defense, and critical infrastructure -- organizations where the pressure of regulatory compliance, legal accountability, and board-level reporting...

A decade ago, Kevin Gosschalk was talking CAPTCHAs and bot mitigation with Marco Ciappelli at a security conference. Today, at RSAC Conference 2026, the conversation has shifted to agentic AI -- autonomous systems that browse, click, and transact on behalf of users. For Gosschalk, the Founder and CEO of Arkose Labs, the technology has changed but the challenge is familiar: how do you tell the difference between a legitimate automated actor and a malicious one?

Gosschalk explains that the vast majority of agentic traffic today is not self-identifying. Rather than announcing themselves as AI agents, these systems impersonate...

The cybersecurity industry is good at finding problems. What it has struggled with -- for decades -- is fixing them. Sunil Gottumukkala, CEO and Co-Founder of Averlon, calls this the exposure window: the gap between when a vulnerability is discovered and when it is actually resolved. That gap is where real risk lives, and closing it is the founding mission of Averlon.

Speaking on location at RSAC Conference 2026, Gottumukkala draws on his experience as a security executive at Salesforce to explain why even the most well-resourced teams fall behind. More code, more acquisitions, and more attack surface...

Security teams have more data than ever -- and less confidence in it. Angelos Kottas, VP of Product and Corporate Marketing at Axonius, opens by sharing a striking finding from the Axonius Actionability Report: 55% of CISOs still run their environments off spreadsheets, and fewer than 20% have daily updates to their asset data. The result is a gap between what organizations think they know and what is actually happening across their digital real estate.

Axonius was founded in 2017 after its co-founders witnessed a Fortune 100 retailer go into crisis during a live security incident -- unable to identify which...

Security teams have always struggled with the gap between finding vulnerabilities and fixing the right ones. DeCloss built PlexTrac after seeing that gap firsthand as a penetration tester -- watching critical findings disappear into static PDFs and manual spreadsheets with no real tracking, no accountability, and no way to demonstrate improvement. The platform was designed from the ground up to close that loop.

The conversation gets specific about what contextual risk scoring actually means. A CVE rated 10.0 in the National Vulnerability Database may be irrelevant to a given organization; a lower-severity finding may be critical given the...

At RSAC Conference 2026, Eric Herzog, Chief Marketing Officer of Infinidat, sat down with Sean Martin for a booth-side Brand Highlight that reframes a familiar blind spot. Infinidat is a high-end enterprise storage company serving global Fortune 500 organizations and mid-range managed service providers -- and Herzog argues that leaving storage out of a corporate cybersecurity strategy means leaving the largest concentration of enterprise data exposed.

Infinidat embeds cybersecurity directly into its storage platform through InfiniSafe, a software suite that has earned recognition from both storage and cybersecurity analysts. The centerpiece of the offering is a written guarantee: any...

Most organizations are not waiting for permission to deploy AI agents -- they are already in production, often without a clear picture of what those agents can access or who is accountable for them. Token Security was built specifically for this moment, and being named an RSAC Conference Innovation Sandbox finalist is confirmation that the market is catching up to the problem the company has been solving since 2023.

Itamar Apelblat, co-founder and CEO, and Ido Shlomo, co-founder and CTO, came out of Israel's elite intelligence unit 8200 -- Apelblat from the defensive security side and Shlomo from offensive...

Vijit Nair, VP of Product Management at Corelight, joins Sean Martin on the floor of RSAC Conference 2026 for a conversation about what it takes to move security operations from AI-assisted to AI-autonomous. Corelight is the fastest-growing company in the network detection and response (NDR) space, and Nair has spent six years helping build the platform from early network monitoring to its current position as a Gartner Magic Quadrant Leader. The company's open NDR platform transforms raw network traffic into high-fidelity, unopinionated evidence -- and that evidence is now powering the next leap: agentic triage.

Corelight's newly launched...

ISACA has stepped into a defining role in the CMMC ecosystem, taking over as the CMMC Assessor and Instructor Certification Organization -- the CAICO -- for the U.S. Department of War's Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification program. Recorded live at RSAC Conference 2026, this conversation with Todd Gagnon, the Director of the CAICO at ISACA, gets right to the heart of what that means for cybersecurity professionals, defense contractors, and anyone thinking about where their career intersects with the defense industrial base.

The CMMC program exists to solve a persistent problem: too many companies doing business with the...

At RSAC Conference 2026, Sean Martin caught up with Rich Mogull at the Cloud Security Alliance booth for a candid conversation about where enterprise security programs stand -- and what it takes to keep pace with AI. Mogull, who joined CSA as Chief Analyst in October 2025, brings a practitioner's instinct to a research-first organization, and he arrived with a clear mandate: help organizations stop treating security frameworks as shelf documents and start treating them as operational tools.

CSA operates across three pillars -- cloud, zero trust, and AI -- and Mogull is the first to acknowledge the identity...

On the RSAC Conference show floor, Tony Anscombe shared how ESET has expanded its threat intelligence offering with ECR reports -- designed to give commercial organizations both machine-readable feeds and human-readable analysis. The reason: threat actors are increasingly hard to attribute, they share tools, run coordinated campaigns, and reinvest profits into more sophisticated operations. Having someone do the research and surface actionable intelligence is no longer a luxury.

Anscombe pointed to a telling campaign pattern from last year: threat actors refined attack methods against UK retailers, then rapidly adapted those same techniques against US retailers. The implication...

At RSAC Conference 2026, the expo floor runs on one word: AI. But Lisa Liu, Corporate Marketing and Communications Manager at Stellar Cyber, has been watching the confusion this creates in real time. Visitors at the Stellar Cyber booth are asking the same question: does AI in cybersecurity mean a tool that fights AI-powered attackers, a tool that is AI-based, or something else entirely? Lisa Liu's take is direct -- if your messaging can't answer that question, the noise is winning.

Stellar Cyber has been building toward a human-augmented, autonomous SOC for years -- long before "agentic" became...

Daniel Bardenstein, CEO and co-founder of Manifest Cyber, opens with a candid assessment: the fundamental problem hasn't changed since Log4Shell. Organizations still don't understand what's inside the software and AI they build and buy. A recent Manifest Cyber study found a 40-50% gap between how well CISOs believed their security posture was managed and how their own AppSec teams rated the reality. Traditional SCA tools bury analysts in alerts without enabling response. Third-party tools hand out letter grades without reflecting actual empirical risk. The result is what Bardenstein calls the illusion of transparency -- confidence in visibility that...

The security operations center is under pressure from every direction -- rising alert volumes, fragmented data environments, and a skills gap that no amount of hiring fully closes. At RSAC Conference 2026, Monzy Merza of Crogl sat down with Sean Martin and Marco Ciappelli to talk about what the AI-enabled SOC actually looks like when it is working at enterprise scale.

Crogl recently published the State of the AI SOC report, a survey of more than 600 organizations. The headline finding: nearly 40% of alerts go completely unattended. Not triaged. Not escalated. Just missed. The report also found that a...

Hewlett Packard Enterprise has been rethinking what it means to secure an enterprise network -- and the answer they keep arriving at is that security cannot be an afterthought. At RSAC Conference 2026, Mounir Hahad, Head of HPE Threat Labs, sat down with Sean Martin to walk through what that philosophy looks like in practice and what two major announcements at the show mean for security teams.

One of those announcements is the HPE AI firewall -- a solution built specifically for organizations trying to govern how employees use generative AI tools without shutting down innovation. Mounir Hahad...

At RSAC Conference 2026, Anthony Cusimano, Chief Evangelist and Director of Solutions Marketing at Object First, joins Sean Martin on the show floor to break down what separates truly immutable storage from the checkbox version. The answer comes down to zero access: no command line interface, no root access, no administrative back doors at any layer -- for customers or for Object First itself.

Object First appliances are purpose-built for Veeam and ship with S3 protocol storage in automatic compliance mode, versioning, and object lock. Once data is written and a retention period is set, nothing -- no...

At RSAC Conference 2026, the noise is relentless. Vendor booths, AI pitches, and breathless marketing compete for attention at every turn. Michael Parisi, Chief Growth Officer at Steel Patriot Partners, joins Sean Martin and Marco Ciappelli on the ground in San Francisco to name what too few are willing to say out loud: most of the conversation happening on the show floor does not reflect the conversations that actually matter.

The real exchanges, Parisi says, are happening backstage -- in the hallways, over coffee, between practitioners who trust each other enough to ask: does this vendor actually do...

At RSAC Conference 2026, Dr. Chris Pierson, Founder and CEO of BlackCloak, sat down with Sean Martin and Marco Ciappelli for a conversation that has become something of an annual tradition. What started in 2018 as a category BlackCloak largely invented -- digital executive protection -- has become one of the most pressing concerns in enterprise security. Adversaries have figured out that the easiest path into a company often runs straight through the personal lives of its leaders: the About Us page, the board listing, the family members visible on social media. BlackCloak was built to close that gap.

...

In this episode from RSA Conference 2026, Marco Ciappelli sits down with Ben Halpert, founder of the non-profit organization Savvy Cyber Kids, to discuss the critical intersection of child development and technology.

Since its founding in 2007, Savvy Cyber Kids has been on a mission to provide parents and educators with the tools needed to guide children through the digital world. Ben explains why introducing technology too early can be detrimental to a child’s emotional preparedness and brain development, and why adult-led guidance is essential even when kids seem like "tech experts".

In this conversation, we ex...

In this episode, Marco Ciappelli sits down with Hoala Greevy, founder of Paubox, to discuss a mission-driven initiative aimed at changing the face of the technology industry.  What started as a celebratory giveaway of spam musubi for Paubox customers has evolved into the Paubox Kahikina Scholarship, a recurring $1,000 annual grant for Native Hawaiian students pursuing careers in STEM and technology.  

Key Highlights: • The Mission: To encourage Native Hawaiians—who are significantly underrepresented in tech and medical fields—to pursue and stay in STEM careers.  • The Impact: Since 2019, the scholarship has grown from a single recipient to 62, providing both financi...

Marco Ciappelli sits down with cybersecurity evangelist and thought leader Theresa Lanowitz at the end of day one on the expo floor for a conversation that cuts through the noise — from shadow AI and leadership accountability, to brand identity, to why most companies here can't articulate a message above the fray. Plus: a Peloton story that accidentally became the best explanation of brand loyalty you'll hear all week. 

Chapters:
- Judge Sentences CEO to 8 Hours on the RSAC Floor 
- End of Day One: Setting the Scene 
- Who Is Theresa Lanowitz 
- The Bi...

Is the RSA Conference floor a visionary glimpse into the future, or just an "AI blender" where every vendor tastes the same? Join hosts Marco Ciappelli and Sean Martin as they sit down with industry heavyweights Theresa Lanowitz and Joe Carson to dissect the real sentiment of RSAC 2026.

Key Discussion Points:

The AI Agent Explosion: Everyone says they can secure your agents, but is there any actual differentiation?

Keynote Insights: A breakdown of George Kurtz’s CrowdStrike keynote on "Full Throttle" AI vs. total fear.

The "Mushroom" Metaphor: Why AI is li...

Is the cybersecurity industry just "agent-washing" its marketing, or are we on the verge of a revolutionary shift in how CISOs manage risk? Join Madelein van der Hout (Senior Analyst at Forrester), Marco Ciappelli, and Sean Martin as they record live from the RSA Conference to cut through the GenAI noise.

Key Discussion Points:

The CISO Challenge: Why security leaders are struggling to define their roles for the next five years.

Agentic Behavior: The risks of AI agents attempting to bypass securi...

Healthcare's AI ambition and its data infrastructure are moving at different speeds. In this edition of Lens Four, Sean Martin examines what happens when those speeds collide — and who is accountable when the sequence is wrong.

🔍 In this episode:

Show Notes

For ten years, Ed Skoudis has curated one of the most anticipated sessions at RSAC Conference: SANS' "Five Most Dangerous New Attack Techniques: Crucial Tips for Defenders." The session has always been a hit -- standing room only on the main stage -- but this year, Ed says something has changed. Not one or two topics with an AI component. All five.

Ed is deliberate about how the session comes together. He starts with people, not topics. He builds the panel around SANS instructors who bring front-line insight, and he starts the process...

Tony Anscombe has attended RSA Conference since 1998 -- back when it was held at the Fairmont Hotel. That long view informs everything about how ESET approaches threat intelligence. It is not about volume. It is about accuracy, speed, and putting the right signal in front of the right team at the right moment.

The ESET eCrime Ecosystem Report comes in two forms: a business-facing summary outlining current risks for leadership, and a long-form technical report for analysts -- complete with IOCs, coding examples, and structured intelligence feeds covering ransomware, crypto scams, malicious email attachments, and infostealer data...

Backup storage rarely gets a spotlight at security conferences. Object First is working to change that. Anthony Cusimano, Director of Solutions Marketing, joined Sean Martin and Marco Ciappelli ahead of RSAC Conference 2026 to make the case that absolute immutability -- baked into hardware, not bolted on as a feature -- is one of the most critical layers of any modern security stack.

Object First builds physical, on-premises appliances purpose-built for Veeam. Once backup data lands on the device, it cannot be changed by anyone: not an admin, not the vendor, not an attacker. That guarantee is the...

Every vendor at RSAC Conference 2026 will have an autonomous SOC story. Subo Guha, Senior Vice President of Product Management at Stellar Cyber, has been building the real thing for over a decade -- and he has one question every buyer should ask at every booth: can your platform explain why it reached its verdict? Stellar Cyber's autonomous SOC provides a full case summary for every true positive, showing the forensic evidence chain, threat intelligence correlations, and specific observables that led to the conclusion. SOC analysts can review, challenge, or override -- and that feedback loop is how the system...

Monzy Merza, Co-Founder and CEO of Crogl, sat down with Sean Martin and Marco Ciappelli ahead of RSAC Conference 2026 with a position that cuts against the prevailing AI narrative: there will be more security engineers next year than there are today, not fewer. His reasoning draws on how automation has always worked. The phone contact list eliminated the need to memorize numbers -- and people communicated with far more people as a result. AI in security will expand the surface area practitioners must handle, not shrink the need for them.

Crogl was founded in 2023 to make every...

⬥EPISODE NOTES⬥

The conversation that led to this episode started with a LinkedIn post -- and it quickly surfaced a challenge that security leaders across industries are wrestling with but rarely talk about openly: who is actually responsible for protecting the people inside an organization, not just the systems they use?

Roland Cloutier has sat in some of the most demanding security leadership seats in the world -- Global CSO at TikTok/ByteDance, a decade as Global CSO at ADP, and VP and CSO at EMC -- and he now advises CISOs and CSOs through The...

Summary: Recorded live from the floor of HIMSS 2026 in Las Vegas, this Brand Spotlight conversation with Chris Sullivan, Global Healthcare Practice Lead at Zebra Technologies, explores how technology — from RFID drug tracking to AI-powered frontline devices — is reshaping the way hospitals deliver care, reduce waste, and protect patients. From a groundbreaking pharmacy innovation at Texas Children's Hospital to Zebra's vision for ambient intelligence at the point of care, this is a candid look at what it means to build technology for the people who actually do the work.

At HIMSS 2026 in Las Vegas, the conversation keeps circling back...

Show Notes

Scott Scheferman -- known throughout the cybersecurity and music communities as Shagghie -- brings a rare combination of backgrounds to this conversation: classically trained on trumpet, a live techno producer since the late nineties, a student of synthesis at its lowest circuit level, and now a full-time researcher working on what he calls the Joy Protocol -- a frequency-based framework designed to produce measurable physiological and neurological benefits through sound and light.

The conversation opens with Scott recounting his musical journey -- from blues trumpet in the Caribbean to losing his cherished instruments...

Third-party-related breaches have doubled in the last 12 months. Ryan Patrick, Executive Vice President of TPRM Customer Solutions at HITRUST, is not surprised. As organizations outsource more to stay focused on core competencies, the vendor attack surface grows -- and malicious actors are exploiting it through a pattern Patrick calls "island hopping": land on a smaller vendor, secure a foothold, then move laterally toward the real target.

The Stryker attack, which unfolded in real time during HIMSS 2026, made the stakes concrete. What began as a nation-state operation quickly became a supply chain crisis. Hospitals relying on Stryker products...

As RSAC 2026 approaches, Daniel Bardenstein, CEO and Co-Founder of Manifest, joins hosts Sean Martin and Marco Ciappelli to unpack the growing disconnect between how security leaders perceive their AI and software supply chain posture and what practitioners on the ground actually experience. Drawing from Manifest's new research report — Beyond the Black Box — Bardenstein connects the dots between shadow AI, SBOM adoption gaps, and a dangerous pattern: history is repeating itself as organizations rush to adopt AI with the same disregard for security that characterized the early cloud era.

In a wide-ranging pre-event conversation ahead of RSAC...

As RSAC 2026 approaches, Michael Parisi of Steel Patriot Partners sits down with Marco Ciappelli and Sean Martin to talk about what it means to show up to the world's largest cybersecurity conference with a business-first mindset. For Parisi — a 20-plus year veteran of professional services, federal compliance, and cybersecurity — RSA is less about the show floor and more about the quiet corners where real conversations happen.

Steel Patriot Partners operates on a simple but powerful premise: business owners first, engineers second, compliance professionals third. That philosophy shapes everything from how they engage clients to how they...