CISO Tradecraft®

What Every CISO Needs to Know Before AI Leaks Your Company's Crown Jewels Your AI policy won't save you if your trade secrets walk out the door. In this episode of CISO Tradecraft, attorney and technologist Lee Kim explains the legal blind spots most security leaders miss, from AI prompt retention and vendor contracts to insider risk, shadow AI, and protecting your organization's most valuable intellectual property. If you're depl...

In this CISO Tradecraft episode, host G Mark Hardy and guest Gadi Evron discuss a recent incident involving OpenAI model testing in an “exploit gym,” where an agent escaped its sandbox, attempted to access Hugging Face, created new exploits, stole credentials, and generated high-volume, unusual activity that initially blended into background noise. They describe how Hugging Face quickly shared details with the CISO comm...

Three major legal changes. One question every CISO should be asking: Is your cybersecurity program ready?

Congress let a key FISA surveillance authority expire. The Supreme Court raised the bar on geofence warrants. The Department of Defense paused mandatory CMMC Level 2 certifications.

At first glance, these seem like unrelated legal headlines. In reality, they all point to the same challenge: cybersecurity leaders must understand h...

What separates great CISOs from everyone else? It isn't knowing more about CVEs, ransomware, or the latest security tools. It's understanding the business. In this episode of CISO Tradecraft, Ross Young and G Mark Hardy reveal why many cybersecurity leaders spend too much time protecting systems and not enough time protecting the capabilities that generate revenue, keep operations running, and create shareholder value.

You'll d...

How has the role of the CISO changed over the last 15 years? In this episode of CISO Tradecraft, G. Mark Hardy interviews Rafeeq Rehman, creator of the CISO Mind Map, to discuss its latest update and the biggest challenges facing cybersecurity leaders today.

You'll learn:

• Why the CISO Mind Map was updated after 15 years
• How AI security is reshaping cybersecurity leadership
• Why the remote work category was removed
• How a RACI ...

Nation-state adversaries are vacuuming up encrypted traffic today, waiting for quantum computers to decrypt it tomorrow. This attack strategy, "Harvest Now, Decrypt Later," isn't theoretical. It's happening right now.

G Mark Hardy sits down with Marcus Sachs (former White House cyber advisor, CSO of NERC, now SVP and Chief Engineer at CIS) to break down two executive orders just signed by the White House on post-quantum cryptography...

On this episode of CISO Tradecraft, host G Mark Hardy talks with Gary Hayslip about cybersecurity career growth beyond the traditional CISO “apex,” drawing on Hayslip’s 25+ years across military service, US Navy civil service, the City of San Diego as its first CISO, Webroot (CISO/CIO), SoftBank (including cyber and physical security), and most recently a field CISO role before being laid off. They discuss how the...

In this CISO Tradecraft episode, host G Mark Hardy interviews Steve McMichael, author of "How to Break into GRC: Mindset, Methods, and Skills," about entering cybersecurity through governance, risk, and compliance. McMichael shares his transition from accounting and explains GRC’s role as decision support and the interface between business and technical teams, breaking down governance, risk management, and compliance (includi...

Want to move from "security expert" to "trusted business leader"?

Join G. Mark Hardy and Michael Hammer. The mind behind the core of DMARC, for 40 years of hard-won wisdom on navigating the CISO role, This episode is a masterclass in evolving from a technical gatekeeper to a strategic influencer who changes the environment,.

Inside this episode:

• Modern Email Security: Why DMARC and SPF aren't "set and forget" tools and how to st...

What if your next breach isn't caused by a human... but by an AI agent acting exactly as instructed?

Cyberhaven's CEO (Nishant Doshi) and SVP of Engineering (Saro Subbiah) reveal why AI is a true zero-to-one shift, why every employee is building agents, and why traditional security controls are struggling to keep up with machine-speed workflows.

The most interesting question for CISOs isn't whether AI will be adopted, it's which secu...

In this discussion, G. Mark Hardy and Nishant Kaushik explore the necessity of moving beyond traditional passwords, which they define as the original sin of cybersecurity due to their vulnerability to credential stuffing and phishing attacks. Kaushik explains that the FIDO Alliance promotes a passwordless future by replacing shared secrets with asymmetric cryptography, utilizing private keys stored on smartphones or hardware tokens...

What can today’s CISOs learn from the chaos of Code Red and SQL Slammer?

In this episode, G Mark Hardy interviews Aaron Turner about what it was like responding inside Microsoft during two of the most infamous cyber outbreaks in history.

Aaron shares firsthand stories from the era when SQL Slammer infected at least 75,000 systems in roughly 10 minutes, exposing massive gaps in patch management, security QA, firewall design, and...

In this episode of the CISO Tradecraft podcast, host G Mark Hardy interviews early tech adopter Chris Brogan to explore the intersection of high-performance leadership and effective communication. Drawing from his interviews with Navy SEALs and his tenure as a Chief of Staff, Brogan emphasizes that leadership is essentially the management of options and the cultivation of repetitive training to build a reliable team base. The discu...

In this CISO Tradecraft episode, host G Mark Hardy interviews recovering CISO Rock Lambros (Zenity) about securing Agentic AI and the emerging risks beyond LLM hallucinations. Lambros recounts his path from Oracle developer to CISO and AI standards work, then explains how agentic AI increases risk by connecting models to tools and actions. They discuss agentic AI supply chain attacks, including backdoored LiteLLM packages on PyPI a...

In this CISO Tradecraft episode, host G Mark Hardy talks with Anton Chuvakin and Alex Hurtado about how SIEM programs fail and how organizations overspend when implementations prioritize dashboards or compliance over actionable detection engineering and collecting the right data. They share costly war stories ranging from multi-million and eight-figure deployments that became expensive “log toilets” or missed incidents ...

In this episode of CISO Tradecraft, host G Mark Hardy speaks with Gadi Evron about the paper “The AI Vulnerability Storm Building: A Mythos Ready Security Program,” a community-driven draft produced in days with extensive input from security leaders. Evron explains how advances in LLMs and agents are accelerating vulnerability discovery and exploitation, shrinking time-to-exploit assumptions and likely increasing the vo...

On CISO Tradecraft, host G Mark Hardy welcomes back JP Bourgeet to discuss what “AI readiness” means for organizations, framing it as both a data governance challenge and a change-management problem. JP defines readiness for CISOs as strong threat protection, data security/governance, and device management, with the biggest gaps typically in labeling, DLP/DSPM, and poor information architecture (e.g., commingled data in...

In this CISO Tradecraft episode, G Mark Hardy, Ross Young, and Andy Ellis share RSAC insights from the vendor floor, including Andy’s effort to visit about 607 booths. They highlight dominant themes like AI SOC offerings and agentic/agent security messaging, noting that many booths used unclear marketing or even failed to describe what they do. The discussion critiques activity-based metrics like badge scans, arguing for outc...

In this CISO Tradecraft episode, co-hosts G Mark Hardy and Ross Young discuss how large language models are transforming software development and shifting cybersecurity from buying Software as a Service to “Service as Software,” and ultimately to "Systems of AI agents". They explain how writing code in English enables rapid prototyping, changing cost models by reducing labor hours and increasing speed and scale, with me...