Human Element

The most sophisticated security tools fail when leaders don't understand the business context they're supposed to protect. Michael Freeman, Head of Threat Intelligence at Armis, learned this lesson during a major security incident where his team had the intelligence from day one but missed the breach because they didn't understand what was important to the business. The most effective security leaders aren't just technical experts,...

The transition from technical security expert to effective people leader is way more challenging than it might sound. Darren LaCasse, Director of Threat Intelligence, Detection, & Response at Elastic, learned this lesson through a management mistake that almost cost him a team member and taught him the fundamental difference between managing work output and leading human beings. His journey from classified government security t...

Duaine Labno, Director of Special Investigations and Threat Intelligence at TIG Risk Services, shares with Ben how his background in law enforcement shaped his leadership and approach to building elite security teams, including the application of hostage negotiation techniques often overlooked in the industry.

With 26 years of experience, Duaine shares how crisis psychology sharpens threat assessment, from recognizing psychological...

The most effective security leaders don't abandon their technical foundation when they move into management — they transform it into strategic advantage while treating leadership itself as a discipline worthy of rigorous investigation. 

On this episode of Human Element, Robert McArdle, Director FTR & Cybercrime Research at Trend Micro, tells Ben how applying analytical thinking to human psychology and team dynamics creates more...

In today's security landscape, decisive leadership often matters more than technical expertise. Caleb Barlow, CEO of Cyberbit, brings a seemingly unconventional but surprisingly common perspective to security incident response, drawing from his background as an EMT and firefighter, where he learned to make consequential decisions with limited data. 

His conversation with Ben on this episode of Human Element reveals why the underwhe...

In this debut conversation on Human Element, Lance James, Chief Innovations Officer & Founder of Unit 221B, joins our host Ben April, CTO of Maltego, to explore the human side of security leadership and the transformative experiences that shape effective leaders in the industry. Lance shares his unique pattern recognition abilities that span from technical systems to human behavior, explains his first principles approach to com...