____________Podcast
 Redefining Society and Technology Podcast With Marco Ciappelli
https://redefiningsocietyandtechnologypodcast.com 

 

____________Host 

Marco Ciappelli
Co-Founder & CMO @ITSPmagazine | Master Degree in Political Science - Sociology of Communication l Branding & Marketing Advisor | Journalist | Writer | Podcast Host | #Technology #Cybersecurity #Society 🌎 LAX 🛸 FLR 🌍

WebSite: https://marcociappelli.com
On LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marco-ciappelli/

____________This Episode’s Sponsors

BlackCloak provides concierge cybersecurity protection to corporate executives and high-net-worth individuals to protect against hacking, reputational loss, financial loss, and the impacts of a corporate data breach.

BlackCloak:  https://itspm.ag/itspbcweb


____________Title
New Book: SPIES, LIES, AND CYBER CRIME | Former FBI Spy Hunter Eric O'Neill Explains How Cybercriminals Use Espionage techniques to Attack Us | Redefining Society And Technology Podcast With Marco Ciappelli


____________Guests:

Eric O'Neill
Keynote Speaker, Cybersecurity Expert, Spy Hunter, Bestselling Author. Attorney
On LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eric-m-oneill/
Find the book on Eric Website: https://ericoneill.net

Sean Martin, CISSP
GTM Advisor | Journalist, Analyst, Technologist | Cybersecurity, Risk, Operations | Brand & Content Marketing | Musician, Photographer, Professor, Moderator | Co-Founder, ITSPmagazine & Studio C60Sean Martin, Co-Founder, ITSPmagazine and Studio C60 
Website: https://www.seanmartin.com
 

____________Short Introduction 
Former FBI counterintelligence specialist Eric O'Neill, who caught the most damaging spy in US history, reveals how cyber criminals use traditional espionage techniques to attack us. In his new book "Spies Lies and Cyber Crime," he exposes the $14 trillion cybercrime industry and teaches us to recognize attacks in our Hybrid Analog Digital Society.

____________Article 
Trust has become the rarest commodity on Earth. We can't trust what we see, what we hear, or what we read anymore. And the people exploiting that crisis? They learned their craft from spies.

Eric O'Neill knows this better than most. He's the former FBI counterintelligence specialist who went undercover—as himself—to catch Robert Hanssen, Russia's top spy embedded in the FBI for 22 years. That story became his first book "Gray Day" and the movie "Breach." But five years later, Eric's back with a very different kind of warning.

His new book "Spies Lies and Cyber Crime" isn't another spy memoir. It's a field manual for surviving in a world where criminal syndicates have weaponized traditional espionage techniques against every single one of us. And business is booming—to the tune of $14 trillion annually, making cybercrime the third largest economy on Earth, bigger than Japan and Germany combined.

"They're not attacking our computers," Eric told me during our conversation. "They're attacking you and me personally. They're fooling us into just handing everything over."

The pandemic accelerated everything. We were thrown into a completely virtual environment before security was ready, and that moment marks the biggest single rise of cybercrime in history. While most of us were stuck at home adjusting to Zoom calls, cyber criminals were innovating faster than anyone else, studying how we communicate, work, and associate in digital spaces.

Here's what makes Eric's perspective invaluable: he understands both sides of this war. He spent his FBI career using traditional counterintelligence techniques—deception, impersonation, infiltration, confidence schemes, exploitation, and destruction—to catch spies. Now he watches cyber criminals deploy those exact same tactics against us through our screens.

The top cybercrime gangs have actually hired active intelligence officers from countries like Russia, China, and Iran. These spies moonlight as cyber criminals, bringing state-level tradecraft to street-level scams. It's sophisticated, organized, and shockingly effective.

Consider the romance scam Eric describes in the book: a widowed grandfather receives a simple text saying "Hey." Being polite, he responds "Sorry, wrong number." That single response marks him as a target. Over weeks, a "friendship" develops. His new best friend chats with him daily, learns his hopes and dreams, then introduces him to an "investment opportunity."

Within months, the grandfather has invested his entire pension—hundreds of thousands of dollars—into what looks like a legitimate cryptocurrency platform with secure logins and rising account values. When he tries to withdraw money for a family vacation, his friend vanishes. The company doesn't exist. The website was a dummy. Everything is gone.

That's not a quick phishing scam—that's a confidence scheme straight from the spy playbook, adapted for our Hybrid Analog Digital Society where we live in little boxes on screens, increasingly disconnected from physical reality.

The sophistication extends to ransomware operations. These aren't kids in hoodies—they're organized businesses with affiliate programs, marketing departments, tech support teams, and customer service. They're polite as they negotiate your ransom. They help you decrypt your data after you pay. Some even donate to charities. And yes, many victims get hit again a month later by the same group.

What struck me most about our conversation was Eric's emphasis on preparation over panic. He's developed a methodology called PAID: Prepare (ahead of the attack), Assess (constantly look for threats), Investigate (when you identify something suspicious), and Decide (take action).

"You don't want to be in a dark alley before you think about physical security," he explained. "Same with cyber. Don't wait until you're in the middle of a ransomware attack to build your defenses. That's ten times more expensive."

The scale of this threat hasn't fully registered with most people. Cybercrime is projected to hit $18 trillion next year, yet individuals and companies alike operate as if attacks are rare events that happen to other people. The reality? It's not if you'll be attacked, it's when.

Eric wrote "Spies Lies and Cyber Crime" as if you're taking a training course at the FBI Academy for Cyber Criminals. The first part teaches you to think like a bad guy—to recognize deception, impersonation, and confidence schemes. The second part gives you the tools to defend yourself, whether you're protecting your family's data or running enterprise security.

One detail Eric insists on: every parent must read chapters 10 and 11 with their teenagers. The book addresses cyberbullying, exploitation, and social media dangers that have led to teen suicide. Some conversations are that critical.

As we closed our conversation, Eric demonstrated how vulnerable we've become. "How do you even know you're talking to me?" he asked. "I could be sitting here in my pajamas, typing what I want my avatar to say." He's right—deepfakes are that sophisticated now. His advice? Ask everyone in a video meeting to pick up a pen or wave their hands. Avatars can't do that yet.

The word "yet" hangs heavy in that sentence.

We're moving into a world where trust is the most valuable thing on Earth, and cyber criminals are actively destroying it for profit. Eric O'Neill spent his career catching spies who betrayed their country. Now he's teaching us to catch criminals who are betraying all of us, one click at a time.

Subscribe to continue these essential conversations about security, technology, and society. In our increasingly digital world, understanding how cyber criminals think isn't optional anymore—it's survival.
 

____________About the book

Spies, Lies and Cybercrime

Spies, Lies and Cybercrime will appeal to every person curious or frightened by the prospect of a cyberattack, from students and retirees to the C-Suite and boardroom. Readers will take up arms in the current cyber war instead of fleeing while the village burns. They will become email archeologists and threat hunters, questioning every movement online and spotting the attackers hiding in every shadow. They will learn how to embed cybersecurity intrinsically into the culture and technology of their businesses and lives. Only then can we begin to move the needle toward a world safe from cyber-attacks. 

Find it on: https://ericoneill.net


____________Enjoy. Reflect. Share with your fellow humans.

And if you haven’t already, subscribe to Musing On Society & Technology on LinkedIn — new transmissions are always incoming.
https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/musing-on-society-technology-7079849705156870144

You’re listening to this through the Redefining Society & Technology Podcast, so while you’re here, make sure to follow the show — and join me as I continue exploring life in this Hybrid Analog Digital Society.

____________End of transmission

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Guest: Marco Ciappelli, Co-Founder, ITSPmagazine and Studio C60 | Website: https://www.marcociappelli.com

Host: Sean Martin, Co-Founder at ITSPmagazine, Studio C60, and Host of Redefining CyberSecurity Podcast & Music Evolves Podcast | Website: https://www.seanmartin.com/

In this candid episode of Music Evolves, Sean Martin and Marco Ciappelli unpack the creative, ethical, and deeply personal tensions surrounding AI-generated music—where it fits, where it falters, and where it crosses the line.

Sean opens with a clear position: AI can support the creative process, but its outputs shouldn’t be commercialized unless the ingredients—i.e., training data—are ethically sourced and properly licensed. His concern is grounded in authorship and consent. If a model learns from unlicensed tracks, even indirectly, is it sampling without credit?

Marco responds by acknowledging how deeply embedded influence is in all creative acts. As a writer and musician, he often discovers melodies or storylines in his own work that echo familiar structures—not out of theft, but because of lived experience. “We are made of what we absorb,” he says, drawing parallels between human memory and how AI models are trained.

But the critical difference? Humans feel. They reinterpret. They falter. They declare their intent. AI does none of that—at least, not yet.

The discussion isn’t anti-technology. Instead, it’s about boundaries. Both Sean and Marco agree that tools like neural networks can be fascinating collaborators. But when those tools start to blur authorship or generate perfect replicas of a human’s imperfection—say, the crackle of a vinyl or the slide of a finger across a string—what are we really listening to? And who, if anyone, should profit from it?

They wrestle with questions of transparency (“Did you write that… or did AI?”), authorship (“If you like it but don’t know it’s AI, does it matter?”), and commercialization (“Is it still your art if someone else feeds it to a machine?”). And perhaps most importantly, they invite you to answer for yourself.

🎧 At the end of the episode, Sean and Marco each create a 1-minute piece of AI-generated music based on their own interpretation of the conversation. Their challenge: same topic, different vibe. The listener’s challenge: can you feel the difference?

Newsletter (Article, Video, Podcast): From Sampling to Scraping: AI Music, Rights, and the Return of Creative Control: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/from-sampling-scraping-ai-music-rights-return-control-martin-cissp-flxde/

More from Music Evolves: https://www.seanmartin.com/music-evolves-podcast

Music Evolves on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLnYu0psdcllTRJ5du7hFDXjiugu-uNPtW

On Location with Sean and Marco: https://www.itspmagazine.com/on-location

ITSPmagazine YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@itspmagazine

Be sure to share and subscribe!

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In this episode, we unpack the core ideas behind the Sonic Frontiers article “From Sampling to Scraping: AI Music, Rights, and the Return of Creative Control.” As AI-generated music floods streaming platforms, rights holders are deploying new tools like neural fingerprinting to detect derivative works — even when no direct sampling occurs. But what does it mean to “detect influence,” and can algorithms truly distinguish theft from inspiration?

We explore the implications for artists who want to experiment with AI without being replaced by it, and the shifting desires of listeners who may soon prefer human-made music the way some still seek out vinyl, film cameras, or wooden roller coasters — not for efficiency, but for the feel.

The article also touches on the burden of rights enforcement in this new age. While major labels can embed detection systems, who protects the independent artist? And if AI enables anyone to create, does it also require everyone to monitor?

This episode invites you to reflect on what we value in music: speed and volume, or craft and control?

📖 Read the full companion article in the Music Evolves: Sonic Frontiers newsletter for deeper insights: TBD

________

This story represents the results of an interactive collaboration between Human Cognition and Artificial Intelligence.

Enjoy, think, share with others, and subscribe to "The Music Evolves: Sonic Frontiers" newsletter on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/music-evolves-sonic-frontiers-7290890771828719616/

Sincerely, Sean Martin and TAPE9

________

Sean Martin is a life-long musician and the host of the Music Evolves Podcast; a career technologist, cybersecurity professional, and host of the Redefining CyberSecurity Podcast; and is also the co-host of both the Random and Unscripted Podcast and On Location Event Coverage Podcast. These shows are all part of ITSPmagazine—which he co-founded with his good friend Marco Ciappelli, to explore and discuss topics at The Intersection of Technology, Cybersecurity, and Society.™️

Want to connect with Sean and Marco On Location at an event or conference near you? See where they will be next: https://www.itspmagazine.com/on-location

To learn more about Sean, visit his personal website.

More from Music Evolves: https://www.seanmartin.com/music-evolves-podcast

Music Evolves on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLnYu0psdcllTRJ5du7hFDXjiugu-uNPtW

On Location with Sean and Marco: https://www.itspmagazine.com/on-location

ITSPmagazine YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@itspmagazine

Be sure to share and subscribe!

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⬥GUEST⬥

Walter Haydock, Founder, StackAware | On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/walter-haydock/

⬥HOST⬥

Sean Martin, Co-Founder at ITSPmagazine and Host of Redefining CyberSecurity Podcast | On LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/imsmartin/ | Website: https://www.seanmartin.com

⬥EPISODE NOTES⬥

No-Code Meets AI: Who’s Really in Control?

As AI gets embedded deeper into business workflows, a new player has entered the security conversation: no-code automation tools. In this episode of Redefining CyberSecurity, host Sean Martin speaks with Walter Haydock, founder of StackAware, about the emerging risks when AI, automation, and business users collide—often without traditional IT or security oversight.

Haydock shares how organizations are increasingly using tools like Zapier and Microsoft Copilot Studio to connect systems, automate tasks, and boost productivity—all without writing a single line of code. While this democratization of development can accelerate innovation, it also introduces serious risks when systems are built and deployed without governance, testing, or visibility.

The conversation surfaces critical blind spots. Business users may be automating sensitive workflows involving customer data, proprietary systems, or third-party APIs—without realizing the implications. AI prompts gone wrong can trigger mass emails, delete databases, or unintentionally expose confidential records. Recursion loops, poor authentication, and ambiguous access rights are all too easy to introduce when development moves this fast and loose.

Haydock emphasizes that this isn’t just a technology issue—it’s an organizational one. Companies need to decide: who owns risk when anyone can build and deploy a business process? He encourages a layered approach, including lightweight approval processes, human-in-the-loop checkpoints for sensitive actions, and upfront evaluations of tools for legal compliance and data residency.

Security teams, he notes, must resist the urge to block no-code outright. Instead, they should enable safer adoption through clear guidelines, tool allowlists, training, and risk scoring systems. Meanwhile, business leaders must engage early with compliance and risk stakeholders to ensure their productivity gains don’t come at the expense of long-term exposure.

For organizations embracing AI-powered automation, this episode offers a clear takeaway: treat no-code like production code—because that’s exactly what it is.

⬥ADDITIONAL INFORMATION⬥

✨ More Redefining CyberSecurity Podcast: 

🎧 https://www.seanmartin.com/redefining-cybersecurity-podcast

Redefining CyberSecurity Podcast on YouTube:

📺 https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLnYu0psdcllS9aVGdiakVss9u7xgYDKYq

📝 The Future of Cybersecurity Newsletter: https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/7108625890296614912/

Interested in sponsoring this show with a podcast ad placement? Learn more:

👉 https://itspm.ag/podadplc

⬥KEYWORDS⬥

sean martin, walter haydock, automation, ai, nocode, compliance, governance, orchestration, data privacy, redefining cybersecurity, cybersecurity podcast, redefining cybersecurity podcast

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What does it really take to be a CISO the business can rely on? In this episode, Sean Martin shares insights from a recent conversation with Tim Brown, CISO at SolarWinds, following his keynote at AISA CyberCon and his role in leading a CISO Bootcamp for current and future security leaders. The article at the heart of this episode focuses not on technical skills or frameworks, but on the leadership qualities that matter most: context, perspective, communication, and trust.

Tim’s candid reflections — including the personal toll of leading through a crisis — remind us that clarity doesn’t come from control. It comes from connection. CISOs must communicate risk in ways that resonate across teams and business leaders. They need to build trusted relationships before they’re tested and create space for themselves and their teams to process pressure in healthy, sustainable ways.

Whether you’re already in the seat or working toward it, this conversation invites you to rethink what preparation really looks like. It also leaves you with two key questions: Where do you get your clarity, and who are you learning from? Tune in, reflect, and join the conversation.

📖 Read the full companion article in the Future of Cybersecurity newsletter for deeper insights: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/beyond-title-what-really-takes-ciso-today-insights-sean-martin-cissp-n73ie/

________

This story represents the results of an interactive collaboration between Human Cognition and Artificial Intelligence.

Enjoy, think, share with others, and subscribe to "The Future of Cybersecurity" newsletter on LinkedIn: https://itspm.ag/future-of-cybersecurity

Sincerely, Sean Martin and TAPE9

________

Sean Martin is a life-long musician and the host of the Music Evolves Podcast; a career technologist, cybersecurity professional, and host of the Redefining CyberSecurity Podcast; and is also the co-host of both the Random and Unscripted Podcast and On Location Event Coverage Podcast. These shows are all part of ITSPmagazine—which he co-founded with his good friend Marco Ciappelli, to explore and discuss topics at The Intersection of Technology, Cybersecurity, and Society.™️

Want to connect with Sean and Marco On Location at an event or conference near you? See where they will be next: https://www.itspmagazine.com/on-location

To learn more about Sean, visit his personal website.

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First CISO Charged by SEC: Tim Brown on Trust, Context, and Leading Through Crisis - Interview with Tim Brown | AISA CyberCon Melbourne 2025 Coverage | On Location with Sean Martin and Marco Ciappelli

AISA CyberCon Melbourne | October 15-17, 2025

Tim Brown's job changed overnight. December 11th, he was the CISO at SolarWinds managing security operations. December 12th, he was leading the response to one of the most scrutinized cybersecurity incidents in history.

Connecting from New York and Florence to Melbourne, Sean Martin and Marco Ciappelli caught up with their longtime friend ahead of his keynote at AISA CyberCon. The conversation reveals what actually happens when a CISO faces the unthinkable—and why the relationships you build before crisis hits determine whether you survive it.

Tim became the first CISO ever charged by the SEC, a distinction nobody wants but one that shaped his mission: if sharing his experience helps even one security leader prepare better, then the entire saga becomes worthwhile. He's candid about the settlement process still underway, the emotional weight of having strangers ask for selfies, and the mental toll that landed him in a Zurich hospital with a heart attack the week his SEC charges were announced.

"For them to hear something and hear the context—to hear us taking six months off development, 400 engineers focused completely on security for six months in pure focus—when you say it with emotion, it conveys the real cost," Tim explained. Written communication failed during the incident. People needed to talk, to hear, to feel the weight of decisions being made in real time.

What saved SolarWinds wasn't just technical capability. It was implicit trust. The war room team operated without second-guessing each other. The CIO handled deployment and investigation. Engineering figured out how the build system was compromised. Marketing and legal managed their domains. Tim didn't waste cycles checking their work because trust was already built.

"If we didn't have that, we would've been second-guessing what other people did," he said. That trust came from relationships established long before December 2020, from a culture where people knew their roles and respected each other's expertise.

Now Tim's focused on mentoring the next generation through the RSA Conference CSO Bootcamp, helping aspiring CISOs and security leaders at smaller companies build the knowledge, community, and relationships they'll need when—not if—their own December 12th arrives. He tailors every talk to his audience, never delivering the same speech twice. Context matters in crisis, but it matters in communication too.

Australia played a significant role during SolarWinds' incident response, with the Australian government partnering closely in January 2021. Tim hadn't been back in a decade, making his return to Melbourne for CyberCon particularly meaningful. He's there to share lessons earned the hardest way possible, and to remind security leaders that stress management, safe spaces, and knowing when to compartmentalize aren't luxuries—they're survival skills.

His keynote covers the different stages of incident response, how culture drives crisis outcomes, and why the teams that step up matter more than the ones that run away. For anyone leading security teams, Tim's message is clear: build trust now, before you need it.

AISA CyberCon Melbourne runs October 15-17, 2025 Coverage provided by ITSPmagazine

GUEST:

Tim Brown, CISO at SolarWinds | On LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tim-brown-ciso/

HOSTS:

Sean Martin, Co-Founder, ITSPmagazine and Studio C60 | Website: https://www.seanmartin.com

Marco Ciappelli, Co-Founder, ITSPmagazine and Studio C60 | Website: https://www.marcociappelli.com

Catch all of our event coverage: https://www.itspmagazine.com/technology-and-cybersecurity-conference-coverage

Want to share an Event Briefing as part of our event coverage? Learn More 👉 https://itspm.ag/evtcovbrf

Want Sean and Marco to be part of your event or conference? Let Us Know 👉 https://www.itspmagazine.com/contact-us

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AISA CyberCon Melbourne | October 15-17, 2025

Empty shelves trigger something primal in us now. We've lived through the panic, the uncertainty, the realization that our food supply isn't as secure as we thought. Amberley Brady hasn't forgotten that feeling, and she's turned it into action.

Speaking with her from Florence to Sydney ahead of AISA CyberCon in Melbourne, I discovered someone who came to cybersecurity through an unexpected path—studying law, working in policy, but driven by a singular passion for food security. When COVID-19 hit Australia in 2019 and grocery store shelves emptied, Amberley couldn't shake the question: what happens if this keeps happening?

Her answer was to build realfoodprice.com.au, a platform tracking food pricing transparency across Australia's supply chain. It's based on the Hungarian model, which within three months saved consumers 50 million euros simply by making prices visible from farmer to wholesaler to consumer. The markup disappeared almost overnight when transparency arrived.

"Once you demonstrate transparency along the supply chain, you see where the markup is," Amberley explained. She gave me an example that hit home: watermelon farmers were getting paid 40 cents per kilo while their production costs ran between $1.00 to $1.50. Meanwhile, consumers paid $2.50 to $2.99 year-round. Someone in the middle was profiting while farmers lost money on every harvest.

But this isn't just about fair pricing—it's about critical infrastructure that nobody's protecting. Australia produces food for 70 million people, far more than its own population needs. That food moves through systems, across borders, through supply chains that depend entirely on technology most farmers never think about in cybersecurity terms.

The new autonomous tractors collecting soil data? That information goes somewhere. The sensors monitoring crop conditions? Those connect to systems someone else controls. China recognized this vulnerability years ago—with 20% of the world's population but only 7% of arable land, they understood that food security is national security.

At CyberCon, Amberley is presenting two sessions that challenge the cybersecurity community to expand their thinking. "Don't Outsource Your Thinking" tackles what she calls "complacency creep"—our growing trust in AI that makes us stop questioning, stop analyzing with our gut instinct. She argues for an Essential Nine in Australia's cybersecurity framework, adding the human firewall to the technical Essential Eight.

Her second talk, cheekily titled "Everyone is Protecting My Password, But No One's Protecting My Toilet Paper," addresses food security directly. It's provocative, but that's the point. We saw what happened in Japan recently with the rice crisis—the same panic buying, the same distrust, the same empty shelves that COVID taught us to fear.

"We will run to the store," Amberley said. "That's going to be human behavior because we've lived through that time." And here's the cybersecurity angle: those panics can be manufactured. A fake image of empty shelves, an AI-generated video, strategic disinformation—all it takes is triggering that collective memory.

Amberley describes herself as an early disruptor in the agritech cybersecurity space, and she's right. Most cybersecurity professionals think about hospitals, utilities, financial systems. They don't think about the autonomous vehicles in fields, the sensor networks in soil, the supply chain software moving food across continents.

But she's starting the conversation, and CyberCon's audience—increasingly diverse, including people from HR, risk management, and policy—is ready for it. Because at the end of the day, everyone has to eat. And if we don't start thinking about the cyber vulnerabilities in how we grow, move, and price food, we're leaving our most basic need unprotected.

AISA CyberCon Melbourne runs October 15-17, 2025 Virtual coverage provided by ITSPmagazine

GUEST:

Amberley Brady, Food Security & Cybersecurity Advocate, Founder of realfoodprice.com.au | On LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amberley-b-a62022353/

HOSTS:

Sean Martin, Co-Founder, ITSPmagazine and Studio C60 | Website: https://www.seanmartin.com

Marco Ciappelli, Co-Founder, ITSPmagazine and Studio C60 | Website: https://www.marcociappelli.com

Catch all of our event coverage: https://www.itspmagazine.com/technology-and-cybersecurity-conference-coverage

Want to share an Event Briefing as part of our event coverage? Learn More 👉 https://itspm.ag/evtcovbrf

Want Sean and Marco to be part of your event or conference? Let Us Know 👉 https://www.itspmagazine.com/contact-us

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AISA CyberCon Melbourne | October 15-17, 2025

There's something fundamentally broken in how we approach online safety for young people. We're quick to point fingers—at tech companies, at schools, at kids themselves—but Jacqueline Jayne (JJ) wants to change that conversation entirely.

Speaking with her from Florence while she prepared for her session at AISA CyberCon Melbourne this week, it became clear that JJ understands what many in the cybersecurity world miss: this isn't a technical problem that needs a technical solution. It's a human problem that requires us to look in the mirror.

"The online world reflects what we've built for them," JJ told me, referring to our generation. "Now we need to step up and help fix it."

Her session, "Beyond Blame: Keeping Our Kids Safe Online," tackles something most cybersecurity professionals avoid—the uncomfortable truth that being an IT expert doesn't automatically make you equipped to protect the young people in your life. Last year's presentation at Cyber Con drew a full house, with nearly every hand raised when she asked who came because of a kid in their world.

That's the fascinating contradiction JJ exposes: rooms full of cybersecurity professionals who secure networks and defend against sophisticated attacks, yet find themselves lost when their own children navigate TikTok, Roblox, or encrypted messaging apps.

The timing couldn't be more relevant. With Australia implementing a social media ban for anyone under 16 starting December 10, 2025, and similar restrictions appearing globally, parents and carers face unprecedented challenges. But as JJ points out, banning isn't understanding, and restriction isn't education.

One revelation from our conversation particularly struck me—the hidden language of emojis. What seems innocent to adults carries entirely different meanings across demographics, from teenage subcultures to, disturbingly, predatory networks online. An explosion emoji doesn't just mean "boom" anymore. Context matters, and most adults are speaking a different digital dialect than their kids.

JJ, who successfully guided her now 19-year-old son through the gaming and social media years, isn't offering simple solutions because there aren't any. What she provides instead are conversation starters, resources tailored to different age groups, and even AI prompts that parents can customize for their specific situations.

The session reflects a broader shift happening at events like Cyber Con. It's no longer just IT professionals in the room. HR representatives, risk managers, educators, and parents are showing up because they've realized that digital safety doesn't respect departmental boundaries or professional expertise.

"We were analog brains in a digital world," JJ said, capturing our generational position perfectly. But today's kids? They're born into this interconnectedness, and COVID accelerated everything to a point where taking it away isn't an option.

The real question isn't who to blame. It's what role each of us plays in creating a safer digital environment. And that's a conversation worth having—whether you're at the Convention and Exhibition Center in Melbourne this week or joining virtually from anywhere else.

AISA CyberCon Melbourne runs October 15-17, 2025 Virtual coverage provided by ITSPmagazine

___________

GUEST:

Jacqueline (JJ) Jayne, Reducing human error in cyber and teaching 1 million people online safety. 
On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jacquelinejayne/

HOSTS:
Sean Martin, Co-Founder, ITSPmagazine and Studio C60 | Website: https://www.seanmartin.com

Marco Ciappelli, Co-Founder, ITSPmagazine and Studio C60 | Website: https://www.marcociappelli.com

Catch all of our event coverage: https://www.itspmagazine.com/technology-and-cybersecurity-conference-coverage

Want to share an Event Briefing as part of our event coverage? Learn More 👉 https://itspm.ag/evtcovbrf

Want Sean and Marco to be part of your event or conference? Let Us Know 👉 https://www.itspmagazine.com/contact-us

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During his keynote at SecTor 2025, HD Moore, founder and CEO of runZero and widely recognized for creating Metasploit, invites the cybersecurity community to rethink the foundational “rules” we continue to follow—often without question. In conversation with Sean Martin and Marco Ciappelli for ITSPmagazine’s on-location event coverage, Moore breaks down where our security doctrines came from, why some became obsolete, and which ones still hold water.

One standout example? The rule to “change your passwords every 30 days.” Moore explains how this outdated guidance—rooted in assumptions from the early 2000s when password sharing was rampant—led to predictable patterns and frustrated users. Today, the advice has flipped: focus on strong, unique passwords per service, stored securely via password managers.

But this keynote isn’t just about passwords. Moore uses this lens to explore how many security “truths” were formed in response to technical limitations or outdated behaviors—things like shared network trust, brittle segmentation, and fragile authentication models. As technology matures, so too should the rules. Enter passkeys, hardware tokens, and enclave-based authentication. These aren’t just new tools—they’re a fundamental shift in where and how we anchor trust.

Moore also calls out an uncomfortable truth: the very products we rely on to protect our systems—firewalls, endpoint managers, and security appliances—are now among the top vectors for breach, per Mandiant’s latest report. That revelation struck a chord with conference attendees, who appreciated Moore’s willingness to speak plainly about systemic security debt.

He also discusses the inescapable vulnerabilities in AI agent flows, likening prompt injection attacks to the early days of cross-site scripting. The tech itself invites risk, he warns, and we’ll need new frameworks—not just tweaks to old ones—to manage what comes next.

This conversation is a must-listen for anyone questioning whether our security playbooks are still fit for purpose—or simply carried forward by habit.

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GUEST:

HD Moore, Founder and CEO of RunZero | On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hdmoore/

HOSTS:
Sean Martin, Co-Founder, ITSPmagazine and Studio C60 | Website: https://www.seanmartin.com

Marco Ciappelli, Co-Founder, ITSPmagazine and Studio C60 | Website: https://www.marcociappelli.com

RESOURCES:

Keynote: The Once and Future Rules of Cybersecurity: https://www.blackhat.com/sector/2025/briefings/schedule/#keynote-the-once-and-future-rules-of-cybersecurity-49596

Learn more and catch more stories from our SecTor 2025 coverage: https://www.itspmagazine.com/cybersecurity-technology-society-events/sector-cybersecurity-conference-toronto-2025

Mandiant M-Trends Breach Report: https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/threat-intelligence/m-trends-2025/

OPM Data Breach Summary: https://oversight.house.gov/report/opm-data-breach-government-jeopardized-national-security-generation/

Catch all of our event coverage: https://www.itspmagazine.com/technology-and-cybersecurity-conference-coverage

Want to share an Event Briefing as part of our event coverage? Learn More 👉 https://itspm.ag/evtcovbrf

Want Sean and Marco to be part of your event or conference? Let Us Know 👉 https://www.itspmagazine.com/contact-us

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KEYWORDS:

hd moore, sean martin, marco ciappelli, metasploit, runzero, sector, password, breach, ai, passkeys, event coverage, on location, conference

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⸻ Podcast: Redefining Society and Technology
https://redefiningsocietyandtechnologypodcast.com 

______Title: AI Creativity Expert Reveals Why Machines Need More Freedom - Creative Machines: AI, Art & Us Book Interview | A Conversation with  Author Maya Ackerman | Redefining Society And Technology Podcast With Marco Ciappelli

______Guest: Maya Ackerman, PhD.
Generative AI Pioneer | Author | Keynote Speaker
On LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mackerma/
Website: http://www.maya-ackerman.com
 

_____Short Introduction: Dr. Maya Ackerman, AI researcher and author of "Creative Machines: AI, Art, and Us," challenges our assumptions about artificial intelligence and creativity. She argues that ChatGPT is intentionally limited, that hallucinations are features not bugs, and that we must stop treating AI as an all-knowing oracle in our Hybrid Analog Digital Society.

_____Article Dr. Maya Ackerman is a pioneer in the generative AI industry, associate professor of Computer Science and Engineering at Santa Clara University, and co-founder/CEO of Wave AI, one of the earliest generative AI startup. Ackerman has been researching generative AI models for text, music and art since 2014, and an early advocate for human-centered generative AI, bringing awareness to the power of AI to profoundly elevate human creativity. Under her leadership as co-founder and CEO, WaveAI has emerged as a leader in musical AI, benefiting millions of artists and creators with their products LyricStudio and MelodyStudio.

Dr. Ackerman's expertise and innovative vision have earned her numerous accolades, including being named a "Woman of Influence" by the Silicon Valley Business Journal. She is a regular feature in prestigious media outlets and has spoken on notable stages around the world, such as the United Nations, IBM Research, and Stanford University. Her insights into the convergence of AI and creativity are shaping the future of both technology and music. A University of Waterloo PhD and Caltech Postdoc, her unique blend of scholarly rigor and entrepreneurial acumen makes her a sought-after voice in discussions about the practical and ethical implications of AI in our rapidly evolving digital world. 


Host: Marco Ciappelli
Co-Founder & CMO @ITSPmagazine | Master Degree in Political Science - Sociology of Communication l Branding & Marketing Advisor | Journalist | Writer | Podcast Host | #Technology #Cybersecurity #Society 🌎 LAX 🛸 FLR 🌍

WebSite: https://marcociappelli.com
On LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marco-ciappelli/

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This Episode’s Sponsors

BlackCloak provides concierge cybersecurity protection to corporate executives and high-net-worth individuals to protect against hacking, reputational loss, financial loss, and the impacts of a corporate data breach.

BlackCloak:  https://itspm.ag/itspbcweb

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⸻ Podcast Summary ⸻ 
I had one of those conversations that makes you question everything you thought you knew about democracy, governance, and the future of human society. Eli Lopian, founder of TypeMock and author of the provocative book on AI-cracy, walked me through what might be the most intriguing political theory I've encountered in years.

⸻ Article ⸻ 

We talk about AI hallucinations like they're bugs that need fixing. Glitches in the matrix. Errors to be eliminated. But what if we've got it completely backward?

Dr. Maya Ackerman sat in front of her piano—a detail that matters more than you'd think—and told me something that made me question everything I thought I understood about artificial intelligence and creativity. The AI we use every day, the ChatGPT that millions rely on for everything from writing emails to generating ideas, is intentionally held back from being truly creative.

Let that sink in for a moment. ChatGPT, the tool millions use daily, is designed to be convergent rather than divergent. It's built to replace search engines, to give us "correct" answers, to be an all-knowing oracle. And that's exactly the problem.

Maya's journey into this field began ten years ago, long before generative AI became the buzzword du jour. Back in 2015, she made what her employer called a "risky decision"—switching her research focus to computational creativity, the academic precursor to what we now call generative AI. By 2017, she'd launched one of the earliest generative AI startups, WaveAI, helping people write songs. Investors told her the whole direction didn't make sense. Then came late 2022, and suddenly everyone understood.

What fascinates me about Maya's perspective is how she frames AI as humanity's collective consciousness made manifest. We wrote, we created the printing press, we built the internet, we filled it with our knowledge and our forums and our social media—and then we created a functioning brain from it. As she puts it, we can now talk with humanity's collective consciousness, including what Carl Jung called the collective shadow—both the brilliance and the biases.

This is where our conversation in our Hybrid Analog Digital Society gets uncomfortable but necessary. When AI exhibits bias, when it hallucinates, when it creates something that disturbs us—it's reflecting us back to ourselves. It learned from our data, our patterns, our collective Western consciousness. We participate in these biases to various degrees, whether we admit it or not. AI becomes a mirror we can't look away from.

But here's where Maya's argument becomes revolutionary: we need to stop wanting AI to be perfect. We need to embrace its capacity to hallucinate, to be imaginative, to explore new possibilities. The word "hallucination" itself needs reclaiming. In both humans and machines, hallucination represents the courage to go beyond normal boundaries, to re-envision reality in ways that might work better for us.

The creative process requires divergence—a vast open space of new possibilities where you don't know in advance what will have value. It takes bravery, guts, and willingness to fall flat on your face. But ChatGPT isn't built for that. It's designed to follow patterns, to be consistent, to give you the same ABAB rhyming structure every time you ask for lyrics. Try using it for creative writing, and you'll notice the template, the recognizable vibe that becomes stale after a few uses.

Maya argues that machines designed specifically for creativity—like Midjourney for images or her own WaveAI for music—are far more creative than ChatGPT precisely because they're built to be divergent rather than convergent. They're allowed to get things wrong, to be imaginative, to explore. ChatGPT's creativity is intentionally kept down because there's an inherent conflict between being an all-knowing oracle and being creative.

This brings us to a dangerous illusion we're collectively buying into: the idea that AI can be our arbitrator of truth. Maya grew up on three continents before age 13, and she points out that World War II is talked about so differently across cultures you wouldn't recognize it as the same historical event. Reality isn't simple. The "truth" doesn't exist for most things that matter. Yet we're building AI systems that present themselves as having definitive answers, when really they're just expressing a Western perspective that aligns with their shareholders' interests.

What concerns me most from our conversation is Maya's observation that some people are already giving up their thinking to these machines. When she suggests they come up with their own ideas without using ChatGPT, they look at her like she's crazy. They honestly believe the machine is smarter than them. This collective hallucination—that we've built ourselves a God—is perhaps more dangerous than any individual AI capability.

The path forward, Maya argues, requires us to wake up. We need diverse AI tools built for specific purposes rather than one omnipotent system. We need machines designed to collaborate with humans and elevate human intelligence rather than foster dependence. We need to stop the consolidation of power that's creating copies of the same convergent thinking, and instead embrace the diversity of human imagination.

As someone who works at the intersection of technology and society, I find Maya's perspective refreshingly honest. She's not trying to sell us on AI's limitless potential, nor is she fear-mongering about its dangers. She's asking us to see it clearly—as powerful technology that's at least as flawed as we are, neither God nor demon, just a mind among minds.

Her book "Creative Machines: AI, Art, and Us" releases October 14, 2025, and it promises to rewrite the narrative from an informed insider's perspective rather than someone with something to gain from public belief. In our rapidly evolving Hybrid Analog Digital Society, we need more voices like Maya's—voices that challenge us to think differently about the tools we're building and the future we're creating.

Subscribe to continue these essential conversations about creativity, consciousness, and our coexistence with increasingly capable machines. Because the real question isn't whether machines can be creative—it's whether we'll have the wisdom to let them be.

__________________ Enjoy. Reflect. Share with your fellow humans.

And if you haven’t already, subscribe to Musing On Society & Technology on LinkedIn — new transmissions are always incoming.
https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/musing-on-society-technology-7079849705156870144

You’re listening to this through the Redefining Society & Technology podcast, so while you’re here, make sure to follow the show — and join me as I continue exploring life in this Hybrid Analog Digital Society.

End of transmission.

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