The ITSPmagazine Podcast

Deadly Bytes: A Book About a Serial Killer, His AI, and a Reflection on Giving Away Our Judgment Confession first: I recorded more conversations than one analog brain can publish on time. This one is from a few months ago. It only got more relevant while it waited. My wife and I can't watch a thriller in peace. Ten minutes in, I start calling it. He's the one. She won't make it. Never trust the ni...

Ryan Grant , Country Manager & GM, North America at ESET , joins Sean Martin to discuss the launch of ESET PROTECT, announced September 30, 2026. The platform brings 24/7 monitoring, AI security, and a cyber warranty to small and midsize businesses. Ryan Grant says the design came from feedback from ESET clients and partners, along with a survey of 2,000 SMB customers earlier this year. About...

Taking Technology for What It Is, and Let's Stop Humanizing AI A new transmission from An Analog Brain In A Digital Age, by Marco Ciappelli Prefer to watch? I recorded this one walking uphill through a Tokyo alley. YouTube: https://youtu.be/5nhBNMJ7LFI TikTok: https://vm.tiktok.com/ZN8hExSpT/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DeF7fz2gdpE/ It was night, the alley was narrow, and the street...

Show Notes Joe Raiola is President and Artistic Director of Theatre Within , the nonprofit behind the Annual John Lennon Tribute , which he has produced since shortly after Lennon's death in December 1980. What began as an informal community gathering of poets, storytellers, and musicians grieving a neighbor has grown into one of New York City's most significant annual benefit concerts, and the on...

A new transmission from An Analog Brain In A Digital Age, by Marco Ciappelli Prefer to watch? I recorded this one standing under Tokyo Tower: On YouTube : https://youtu.be/glGHghhhXWc On Tik Tok : https://vm.tiktok.com/ZN8MM8Hd9/ On Instagram : https://www.instagram.com/reel/DdlAe7tAOQK/?stkn=NTc4MTIwNjQ2YQ== I spent twenty minutes looking for the right angle. A small camera, a mini tripod, a patc...

Show Notes The argument over AI in music presents itself as a fight about authenticity. Josh Gilliland reads it as a fight about who holds the gate. The Founder of JG BeatsLab teaches musicians how to fold generative tools into real workflows, and he watches the platforms assemble a definition of legitimacy that has little to do with how a song actually gets made. That definition, as Gilliland des...

⬥ EPISODE NOTES ⬥ Something structural is shifting in how security work gets done. When anyone on a team can stand up a working tool in an afternoon, the constraint stops being capability and starts being coherence. John Linford , Security Portfolio Director at The Open Group , spends his time on exactly that problem, running the Security Forum, the Open Trusted Technology Forum, and the Assured D...

⬥EPISODE NOTES⬥ For a full year, agentic AI was the pitch. This year the conversation shifted to whether it holds up once it is actually running in production, against real work. Vendors came armed with customer-sourced numbers rather than concept demos — hours returned per analyst per week, percentages of alerts dispositioned without human review, agreement rates measured against human analyst ju...

Matt Covington , Senior Vice President of Product at BlackCloak , says the feature exists because CISOs kept asking the same question. Can you help us manage this influx of deepfake media, whether it arrives by email, video, or voicemail. The requests that follow are familiar. Change the billing information on a vendor. Wire me $5,000 to bail me out of jail. Rather than sitting in line with every...

Matt Covington , Senior Vice President of Product at BlackCloak , walks through two features recently added to the member application. The first grew out of a question the concierge team fielded often. Members planning family travel to China or Eastern Europe wanted to know what to expect, how to protect their devices, and how to stay safe. That work now sits inside the app as a travel advisory pa...

What a company is trying to reach is rarely a certificate. Michael Parisi , Chief Growth Officer at Steel Patriot Partners , treats the destination as the opening question rather than the closing one, and the firm orders its own priorities to match. Business owners first, engineers second, compliance and security people third. What does a secure and compliant business actually look like? It looks...

Show Notes The premise sounds like a stunt. Five strangers, one room, six hours, one original song. Meanwhile the show's host sits at a keyboard with a text prompt and half an hour. Grégoire Gensollen , Producer and Chief Operating Officer at Tucker Tooley Entertainment , built that episode of Band of Strangers knowing he could not predict the outcome, which is precisely why he made it. Gensollen...

An attacker who wants to reach an executive often goes through the people around them. Family members, assistants, advisors, and caregivers all carry access and standing, and none of them sit inside the corporate directory. Dr. Chris Pierson , Founder and CEO of BlackCloak , describes digital executive protection as work that comes down to an individual and the circle around that individual. What...

Kevin Surace , Chief Executive Officer at TokenCore , opens with the attack path he says is doing the most damage right now. A phishing email carries a PDF and no links, so it clears the filters. The domain is one character off from the real one, the site is pixel perfect because AI built both the page and the message, and the employee approves an auth prompt they were already expecting. The code...

BlackCloak collected two Inc. recognitions in 2026. The company was named to Inc.'s Best Workplaces list in June, and in August it landed on the Inc. 5000 for a second consecutive year, at a higher position than the first. Founder and CEO Chris Pierson points both at the same two groups, the people who build BlackCloak and the clients and members who rely on it. What does a second Inc. 5000 rankin...

An imperfect drink with a perfect story. My reflections from Black Hat USA 2026 An Analog Brain In A Digital Age — A Newsletter by Marco Ciappelli No time to read? Let TAPE3 read it to you. 🎙️🤖 On day two we decided to go record our recap at the Black Hat bar. We got there too late to get a drink. The expo floor was closing, and the bartender must have had better things to do. Or another bar to t...

Steel Patriot Partners lists its priorities in an order much of the cybersecurity industry reverses. Business owners first, engineers second, security and compliance people third. Michael Parisi , Chief Growth Officer, says the sequence is deliberate and shapes how the firm opens a client conversation. The order tracks the path the founders took. Jason Ford , Co-Founder and CEO, started in the lat...

Espresso in hand at Black Hat USA 2026, Monzy Merza , Co-Founder and CEO of Crogl , gave Marco Ciappelli the read from a week that started Monday. The free download the company announced the week before had drawn a strong community reaction, and a hackathon was running alongside the conversation with people downloading Crogl , hacking on it, and competing in challenges. Merza credits the openness...

What actually changed for the AI SOC this year? Bill Peterson , Senior Director of Product Marketing at Sumo Logic , says it reached the point of getting into production, where a year or so ago the same conversation was about what was coming. Marco Ciappelli puts the count of companies carrying AI SOC in the name at 43, and Bill Peterson says that number strikes him as low. The market is maturing,...

Lisa Liu , Corporate Marketing and Communications Manager at Stellar Cyber , connects with ITSPmagazine on the floor at Black Hat USA 2026 in Las Vegas. What are buyers asking for now that the RSAC Conference noise has settled? Data. Liu says people have had time to run their own research, look at what vendors offer, and come back using specific keywords and asking for something behind the marketi...

Michael Parisi , Chief Growth Officer at Steel Patriot Partners , connects with ITSPmagazine on location at Black Hat USA 2026 for a recap of the week. He describes Steel Patriot Partners in the order it sets its priorities. Business owners first, engineers second, compliance and security people third. A consulting and advisory company, he says, but really an engineering firm. What changed at this...

Qualys returns to Black Hat USA 2026 with an AI Risk Operations Center built around three principles customers have been asking for over the last three years. May Mitchell , Chief Marketing Officer at Qualys , walks through them in order. Detect vulnerabilities at AI speed. Prioritize what surfaces, because not every finding calls for action in the same hour and the sequence follows the workflows...

Daniel Bardenstein , CEO and Co-Founder of Manifest Cyber , uses RSAC Conference as a fixed point and compares it to what he is hearing in Las Vegas. The marketing has held its shape. At RSAC Conference, companies with little claim to the label were describing themselves as agentic. Here, he cites a survey referenced in a talk that morning counting 47 AI SOC companies among the vendors on site. Wh...

Sean Murphy , Field CISO for North America at F5 , spent the week behind the scenes at Black Hat USA 2026, in the corridors and at dinner with the CISOs and cybersecurity minded people who fill the halls. Marco Ciappelli caught him at the close of it and asked what the industry learned this year. The answer arrived as three words. Vulnerabilities, and the flattening of the curve between vulnerabil...

Brian Dye , Chief Executive Officer at Corelight , spends Black Hat USA 2026 asking every organization he talks to the same question. What are you doing with AI in the SOC? A year ago, he says, teams thought it was a good idea but were wary of it, and people knew LLMs could produce things without being sure what to do with them. Now he is talking with organizations building their own agents for in...