The ITSPmagazine Podcast

⬥EPISODE NOTES⬥ Sean Martin had barely finished his coffee when two separate conversations with CISOs at RSAC 2026 landed the same way: security is not how the business grows, it is how the business stays out of trouble. Compliance drives the tooling. The security team does its job. The business does its job. And the two rarely meet in the middle. That observation kicked off a quick but pointed ex...

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 on...

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 do...

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...

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 har...

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 enf...

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...

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 di...

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 RS...

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 w...

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 cl...

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 leav...

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...

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 curre...

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 cy...

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 st...

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...

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...

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 real...

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...

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. O...

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. O...

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 co...

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 eas...

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...