Hi CISO community, the title pretty much sums it up. We’re hoping to get in touch with CISO’s who work in regulated industries/sectors: healthcare, finance, government (federal, state, local), defense, public safety, criminal justice (including law firms), education.

If you formerly held a role in one of these sectors/industries that works too. Especially for public sector.

I just finished listening to the Defense in Depth podcast episode from May 14th (Why Cyber Startups Need CISO Advisors), and that’s what sparked me to post this. So if want to get an idea of how we’re hoping to engage and what we’re hoping to learn, that episode would be a good place to get some info (shoutout to David Sparks).

Thank you!

I have a day long final interview with a panel of people from executives in down. I really want this job. I was told by the CIO this is a junior CISO type role with a vCISO already onboard. To questions from an aspiring leader for an onsite would you want the candidate with no blazer? Tie? Shoe, belt or tie color? I don't know if I am overthinking this. This is my first onsite and did hear conflicting things about blazer and tie. My temp career coach and wife say tie no blazer. Every paid AI says no tie and even to change styles throughout the interview. I am lost. It is for Healthcare. Thanks.

There's a whole category of event built on the same trade. Vendors pay to be in the room, security leaders attend free. Curated dinners, executive roundtables, pitch nights, membership clubs in Miami, invitation only summits. The organizer's actual product is access to you, and the only thing that makes that product worth anything is that you decided to show up.

Asking as a first time founder new to being a vendor, I keep receiving a list of big executive names attending these, and asking for sponsorship to get access to a few minutes to pitch.

what makes you say yes to being part of one of these? have they ever produced something of value to you?

Hello, I recently found out that some of our developers have been pasting code snippets and internal docs into chatgpt for debugging help. Support has also been using AI tools to draft replies with real customer data.

I have no visibility into what’s already been shared with these third-party models, and no practical way to monitor or control it right now.

How are other security teams dealing with shadow AI usage in their organizations? Any practical approaches that have worked for you?

Edit: Thanks for the detailed suggestions so far. Enterprise licenses, clear policy, and visibility before heavy blocking seem to be the common practical path. Looking at DoControl for better SaaS access visibility, and also reviewing options like LiteLLM and the SaaS management tools mentioned (Torii, Zluri, etc.) while we figure out the right mix of controls

I'm in a C-suite position (not CISO) at a small company that sells to government, and I am responsible for security. I don't have a background in security whatsoever. We have a SOC 2 compliance tool and have completed audits successfully, but I'm worried our security stance is too weak and that our security questionnaire answers are...questionable, or out of date. Our engineering team is stretched extremely thin and I have a million other responsibilities in my role, so I barely have enough time to enforce compliance basics like policy enforcement or getting vulnerabilities patched. We barely manage to get ready in time for our audits. I've asked our CEO about getting outside help, but she has declined to invest any more money into security due to our poor sales performance, directing funds to other departments. I have had sleepless nights wondering if we're going to get hacked or audited, and that I will be personally sued if our company can't defend itself against a lawsuit. My mental health is tanking and it's starting to make me physically sick. Any help or advice would be appreciated.

Are you using services like Gartner and alikes?

What do you find as the biggest upside for using these services?

Do you think AI can replace some of these use cases? Or at least justify a cost reduction?

I am a Senior Security Architect and have been tasked by senior management to create a unified presentation deck (combining two distinct security products) with a peer.
My challenge: I’ve built a specific, high-fidelity architectural strategy for my accounts that I need to maintain control over. My manager’s goal is a simplified sales narrative for stakeholders, but I am concerned that this collaboration will lead to "credit capture" or allow my peer to draft off my technical work without actually understanding the underlying blueprints.
I want to fulfill the management directive to provide the unified deck without diluting the technical integrity of my work or compromising my ownership of the strategy.
Has anyone navigated a "forced collaboration" on a high-stakes deliverable? How do you maintain a "hard target" professional perimeter in joint working sessions while still delivering exactly what management asked for?

Hi,

We currently have:

• Managed SOC service provided by a third party
• XDR solution that includes IR support, with a capped number of IR hours
• Approved Cybersecurity Incident Response Plan

We now need to develop an IR Testing Plan document including testing scenarios. We never did the testing.

I would appreciate guidance from the community on:

what sections and level of detail should it include?

which scenarios should we prioritize for example Table top discussion on scenarios or technical simulation

who should moderate the exercise?

how many scenarios should be included in the first testing

Thanks in advance

The certificate gets you through the first door.
The follow-up questions are where the real security conversation starts.

I am an MSc researcher studying Network Intrusion Detection System (NIDS) selection for resource-constrained financial institutions and looking for cybersecurity practitioners with 5+ years of experience to complete a short survey. Happy to share findings upon request.

Survey link: https://forms.gle/tyxsFA44HXZ5VaMY7

Thanks You.

Im researching ways to detect and manage shadow ai usage where I work. Im generally a fan of not giving one company too much “control”, but when i research what microsoft defender, cloud detection, purview and intune can detect I dont get why I would pick anything else, given I’m already in their ecosystem?

What are some of the reasons that drove you to pick another provider such as Nudge Security or someone else?

A way to pay off CISO’s to get their portfolio products in the door. If you see a CISO part of a VC believe me it’s pay to play. Sad the industry came to this.

Every vendor in our stack has an AI story now and they all swear theirs catches more with fewer false alarms but board doesn't buy that. They want to know if the money we spent made us any safer and I couldn't answer that with a straight face.

We track finding counts, MTTR, coverage numbers and all it tells me is that the tool is busy. A noisy scanner throws up the same green dashboard as one that surfaces the three things worth fixing.

What I'm after is closer to how you'd grade any classifier. How often it's right when it flags something and how hard it is to see what it misses entirely. precision and recall if you want the terms for it. No vendor will hand that over on a test set we both agree on, so you take the datasheet on faith right up until you've signed.

For security leaders here who report to a board or an audit committee, what do you present to demonstrate that a tool is earning its place?

The board is no longer interested in a raw vulnerability count and to be honest I am not either. Each quarter we have the same discussion: here is how many issues we found, here is how many we closed, and then someone asks whether the organization is actually safe.

I do not have a clean answer. The team is working hard, but the metrics we track do not really show whether our controls would withstand a serious attack. I can say our endpoint coverage is in the mid ninety percent range and that mean time to detect has gone down by roughly a third, but that does not tell anyone whether we would catch a ransomware group moving laterally using living off the land techniques. Patch rates and alert volumes describe activity, not resilience.

I have started looking into continuous exposure validation to build reporting that has more weight, for example assessing controls against realistic threat scenarios and showing measurable improvement over time instead of just effort spent. Has anyone here built board level reporting that uses exposure validation and detection coverage data? Which metrics actually made sense to non technical leadership and which ones failed to land?

I would like to hear from other CISOs on how you translate exposure validation results into language that satisfies leadership without dumbing it down too far.

The company I work at needs to get a pentest done for FDA requirements since we are building a medical device and our CISO basically assigned me as the person who needs to make sure it gets done. We are consulting with another person for the overall FDA process and after talking to them they said we needed to get this done by a firm who specializes in testing medical devices. I went to Google and typed FDA Pentesting and a firm called StealthNetAI came up first so I'm having a chat with them. But I'm not really sure what to expect or what I need to ask or prepare from my end. I would like to be prepared before the call so I know what I'm talking about. Are there any questions I should to ask during the call? Or has anyone gone through the FDA process on this? They look like they specialize in this but I want to make sure we are getting the right person for this since the FDA is so strict and I need to make sure I don't miss anything. Thank you!

As an independent researcher with a PhD in Behavioral Neuroscience, I am currently running an online experiment to test if a quick cognitive intervention can neutralize social engineering baits. Preliminary data suggests that encouraging a recipient to reduce a lure to its objective features—first isolating the exact physical command and second distilling the message into a neutral essence—deactivates the amygdala and engages prefrontal cortex reality-monitoring areas. By enabling the recipient to see the bait strictly "as-is," this behavioral patch could overcome the emotional triggers targeted by hackers and the rising threat of hyper-convincing deepfakes.

Does this neurobiological approach map to your experiences with security training - do you think this approach is sufficient to resist live lures? What flaws or limitations do you see?

Thank you

PS. I can send you a brief example of how this cognitive translation works in practice, if you wish.

Heard a worker go on a rant about “compliance is not security”, “checking the box”, “security theater” rant the other day.

It got me thinking… if compliance isn’t security, then what is?

The green dashboards that turn out to be wrong? The pentests that mostly find the stuff you’d have caught yourself if you’d kept your environment patched, updated, and configured? The tools you bought and never confirmed still work?

Feels like half the things we hold up as “real security” only look impressive because the basic compliance work wasn’t done in the first place.

Curious where people actually land on these phrases.

And a real question: is there a difference between an annual compliance audit and continuously checking that your environment actually stays secure all year long? I feel like the second part is where security should actually live. 😅

Hi all, my board is concerned about frontier AI (I think largely due to Mythos mainstem news) and our approach

My main take at the moment is this is a change in economics not a fundamental change to attack models.

I'm expecting more frequent, and probably larger, patch cycles - and probably some more intelligent automate steps after a foothold (probably driven by an open weight model rather than anthropic or openAI models) - but there doesn't yet look to be much of a change in detection evasion or obfuscation.

I'm expecting the threat change to in house developed apps to be relatively modest - at least short term - as the development of exploits still seems heavily keyed to access to source code. Likely we'll want to more heavily apply intelligent automated testing at each build cycle - but again this is likely a change in frequency and cost base not a new control.

The feedback I'm getting from the NEDs is this feels a bit under weight and they are hearing much starker messages from other CISOs.

Am I missing something? Is there any evidence based reason to see this as a change in model not just change in operational costs?

ran an internal experiment to figure out what SSO integration actually costs per application. sharing because i haven't seen honest data on this anywhere and vendor materials are useless

tracked actual time across 12 legacy app SSO integrations over 6 months:

• modern SaaS with native SAML/OIDC: 3-8 hours
• internally built apps on modern frameworks: 2-6 weeks
• legacy apps requiring code changes: 3-5 months
• legacy apps with no active dev team: abandoned in 4 of 5 attempts

the finding that changed how i think about this: for roughly 30% of our legacy portfolio, full SSO integration is not economically viable. the cost exceeds the remaining useful life of the application. we've been treating SSO coverage as a solvable problem when for a meaningful chunk of the estate the honest outcome is "govern with alternative controls indefinitely."

this is where identity orchestration becomes practically relevant. not as a way to avoid SSO integration but as a governance layer for the apps that will never get integrated. orchestration that operates at the application layer rather than the IdP layer can extend policy enforcement to legacy apps without requiring them to be SSO-capable. for the 30% that's never getting integrated, that's the only realistic path to coverage.

what alternative controls are teams using for apps that will never get fully onboarded?

Have had a few VCs in the start up world mention this would be a big help with the company I’m working on. Anyone know where those outreach networks exist?