What does sharpening a knife over a case of onions have to do with incident response? For Myke Lyons, CISO at Cribl, the answer is everything. Myke trained at the Culinary Institute of America — learning speed and accuracy under the clock of a professional kitchen — before a summer IT job in Manhattan set him on an entirely different path. In this episode of The New CISO, host Steve Moore traces that journey and the surprising parallels between culinary craft and security leadership.

The conversation moves through a career that evolved organically: a summer job moving refrigerator-sized printers in a Manhattan ad agency, a crash course in executive white-glove IT support, a breakthrough moment finally cracking subnetting, and a slow expansion from NOC operator to global security leader. Myke credits the kitchen — its insistence on precision and calm under fire — for instilling an operator's mindset that still defines how he leads through incidents today.

Mentorship, both formal and accidental, threads through Myke's story. A curmudgeonly colleague who threatened to "replace him with a script" taught him the value of continuous improvement. A trusted mentor reframed the CISO's role with a single line about house fires and lock changes. And years in executive IT support gave Myke an early education in empathy and knowing when not to fix what wasn't asked.

Myke and Steve examine a vendor incident where a product leader's dismissive response to a forensics question destroyed credibility with hundreds of customers. The lesson: saying "I don't know, but we'll find out" is not a weakness — it is the most powerful tool a leader has. The same insight applies to M&A due diligence, where reframing technical conversations as expectation-setting exercises turns adversarial interviews into collaborative ones.

For Myke, the new CISO is defined by empathy and culture. Know your audience. Think like your customers. Communicate policy changes as explanations, not mandates. Find your internal advocates and invest in them before you need them. The recipe for great security leadership is less about technology than it is about people — and that lesson translates perfectly from the kitchen to the boardroom.

Key Topics

• Career pivots: from culinary school to IT and cybersecurity

• Speed, accuracy, and craft — what kitchen discipline teaches security professionals

• Building an operator's mindset and staying calm during security incidents

• White-glove executive IT support and the patience, precision, and empathy it develops

• Mentorship — formal and accidental — and the lessons that only land in retrospect

• The dangers of filling silence with false confidence vs. the power of saying "I don't know"

• Crisis communication best practices and what not to do during a vendor incident call

• Managing M&A security due diligence with low-emotion, expectation-setting conversations

• Building security culture through empathy, clear communication, and internal advocates

• Telemetry, log management, and Cribl's role as the data engine for IT and security

Guest Bio

Myke Lyons is the Chief Information Security Officer at Cribl, the AI platform for telemetry trusted by organizations worldwide — including half of the Fortune 100 — to manage IT and security data at any scale.

He trained at the Culinary Institute of America with aspirations of becoming a food critic — until a summer IT job in Manhattan set him on an entirely different course. Myke went on to build expertise across networking, NOC operations, and log management, holding CISO positions at Snyk and Collibra before joining Cribl in 2024.

Connect with Myke on LinkedIn and learn more about Cribl at cribl.io.

GET A DEMO:

👉 Get a hands-on demo of the Exabeam products: https://www.exabeam.com/demo

🔔 Subscribe for more product demos and cybersecurity insights!

ABOUT EXABEAM:

Exabeam is the leader in behavior intelligence for the agentic enterprise. As organizations deploy digital workers and confront machine-speed adversaries, Exabeam applies agent-powered analytics to understand and govern the behavior of both human and non-human insiders. With integrated Exabeam Nova cybersecurity agents, Exabeam delivers flexible, industry-proven solutions for insider threat coverage of humans and agents and faster, more accurate threat detection, investigation, and response (TDIR). As the pioneer of user and entity behavior analytics (UEBA) and the innovator behind Agent Behavior Analytics (ABA), Exabeam is trusted by more than 3,000 enterprises worldwide to reduce risk, secure the digital workforce, and accelerate security operations. Learn more at www.exabeam.com.

Exabeam: Real Intelligence. Real Security. Real Fast.

CONNECT WITH US:

X: https://x.com/exabeam

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/exabeam/

Blog: https://www.exabeam.com/blog/