KBKAST

Karissa Breen sits down with Gijo Varghese, Chief Security Officer at OT cyber security firm Secolve, to unpack an uncomfortable trade-off: the same connectivity and AI making power, water and transport smarter are also making them easier to break. Gijo explains how IT and OT convergence has widened the attack surface, why decades-old control systems were never built to touch the internet, and how a single IT intrusion can spill into the physical world. He walks through the incidents that prove it, from the 2015 Ukraine grid attack to Colonial Pipeline, where operators went to run the system by hand and found the people who knew how had all retired, to the Jaguar Land Rover breach that rippled through 5,000 suppliers and cost the UK economy billions. The throughline for boards and executives: a cyber incident stops being a security event the moment it becomes a public safety failure. Gijo makes the case for the kill switch, tested manual fallbacks, and treating resilience rather than compliance as the real measure of readiness.

About Gijo:

Secolve is Australia’s leading OT cybersecurity firm, providing cyber advisory, offensive security, and training services to mines, factories, hospitals, transport networks, and energy ecosystems. As Secolve’s first CSO, Gijo leads the firm’s consultancy and professional services team, transforming complex OT cyber risks into practical action across executive, engineering, and operational teams. 

Keywords: critical infrastructure security, OT security, IT/OT convergence, SCADA, ICS, cyber resilience, kill switch, Colonial Pipeline, Jaguar Land Rover, SOCI Act, CI45, incident response, operational technology, AI cybersecurity, public safety, board governance, cyber warfare, business continuity

In this episode, KB sits down with Mark Thomas, IT governance and risk veteran, ISACA Hall of Famer and president of Escoute Consulting, to pull apart a problem a lot of boards haven’t clocked yet – the gap between owning an AI policy and being able to prove it controls anything.

They get into the Air Canada chatbot case and what it says about accountability, why the honest board test is “would anyone notice if this was violated,” and how the risk changes once agents move from recommending to executing. Mark makes the case that human in the loop only counts when the human has the expertise, the authority and the time to say no. He also explains why only a small fraction of organisations have ever tested their ability to shut a system down, and why accountability never transfers to the vendor.

A practical, occasionally uncomfortable conversation for anyone putting AI into production.

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About Mark:

Mark is known for his ability to translate complex issues into clear, practical insight, helping leaders move from uncertainty to informed, defensible decisions.

Keywords: AI governance, AI risk, board accountability, agentic AI, human in the loop, kill switch, digital trust, AI policy, ISACA, Mark Thomas, Escoute Consulting, KBKast, enterprise AI, AI compliance, EU AI Act, shadow AI, Air Canada chatbot

Most security vendors are shipping AI that treats capability as authority. Sean Duca thinks that’s the mistake customers are already paying for. Back on KBKast for a third time, now as co-founder and CEO of getsoteria.ai, Sean makes the case that confidence and permission are two separate gates, and that an autonomous SOC needs both before it touches anything.

He walks Karissa through governed autonomy: the machine acts on its own, but only inside a boundary it can’t set or cross. A bank teller and a self-driving car do the heavy lifting on the difference between a human in the loop, on the loop, and off it entirely. He gets specific about shadow mode, the 85% agreement bar his threat hunters have to keep clearing, and why his system fails closed and hands everything back to a person the moment it hits a wall.

About Sean:

Keywords: autonomous SOC, AI governance, governed autonomy, agentic AI security, confidence vs permission, human in the loop, AI access control, SOC automation, shadow mode, security operations, AI authority model, CISO, board risk, Sean Duca, getsoteria.ai, KBKast

The old security math is broken. Teams used to get roughly 60 days between a vulnerability going public and attackers using it. Harman Kaur, Tanium’s CTO, explains why that number has flipped to negative, and what it means when the patch you need does not exist yet.

This conversation is about the difference between automation and transformation. Running the same broken process faster is not progress. Harman makes the case for rebuilding security from first principles: changing org charts, retiring tools people have relied on for years, and moving humans out of triage and into judgment.

She also gets specific about trust. In her view, trust now sits in the underlying data, because a confident AI acting on stale or incomplete data becomes dangerous at scale. Harman & KB get into the boardroom scramble around Mythos, why there is no single tool that solves it, and why the vendors closest to the data will be the ones left standing.

About Harman:

Harman brings more than a decade of combined experience across the United States Air Force and Tanium. She continues to serve as a Cyber Officer in the U.S. Air Force. At Tanium, Harman has held senior roles across the customer organization, R&D, and most recently led the company’s AI and Autonomous Endpoint Management strategy as head of AI before stepping into the CTO role. Harman received an MBA from the University of Southern California and a BS in Information Systems from Hawaii Pacific University.

Keywords: cybersecurity, AI security, vulnerability management, patch management, endpoint security, autonomous endpoint management, Tanium, Harman Kaur, security automation, AI transformation, data quality, zero day, CISO, board risk, Mythos, security operations, KBKast

Bradon Rogers, Chief Customer Officer at Island, the company that created the enterprise browser category in 2020, joins KB to unpack why the industry spent two decades bolting security around the browser instead of building it in. They dig into whether organisations are solving complexity or just relocating it, why VPNs and VDI survived so long when everybody hated them, and Bradon’s blunt read on SASE: legacy on-prem architecture shoved into the cloud. He explains why SSL inspection leaves blind spots the laws of physics won’t let you close, what zero trust misses after access is granted, and how data boundaries keep company information out of personal AI tenants without turning security into the say no police.

Bradon closes with his prediction for the next two years: non-human identities, agents working without human hands on the wheel, and agentic engineers who won’t just be developers but lawyers and doctors shepherding agents through their work.

About Bradon:

Keywords: enterprise browser, browser security, Island, zero trust, VPN replacement, VDI, SASE, SSL inspection, DLP, shadow AI, data boundary, agentic AI, AI agents, non-human identity, CISO, cybersecurity podcast

KB is on the ground at SAP Sapphire 2026 in Orlando, where AI has moved beyond experimentation and into the center of enterprise decision making. In this KB On The Go episode, Maura Hameroff (CMO, Cloud ERP Private and RISE with SAP) makes the case that modernizing your core is a business transformation decision rather than a technical upgrade, and that companies still running on legacy systems carry more operational and security risk than most realize.

Then Ted Way, PhD (VP & Chief Product Officer, Business AI Product Engineering, SAP) walks through what responsible enterprise AI actually takes: a governance layer, real business process knowledge, and data you can trust. As he puts it, AI first without security first is just a faster way to a data breach. A grounded look at what it takes to move from AI pilots to AI at scale without cutting corners that come back to bite you.

In this episode, Anna Wheeler, CEO of SSAW LLC, joins KB as she explains why so many cyber teams are stuck in event-driven strategy while calling it the real thing, why the doers can’t climb out of it because their KPIs won’t let them, and why visionary CEOs keep getting ousted when the board can’t see what they see. Along the way: the CEOs quietly burning more AI tokens than anyone else in their company, vendors winning unicorn exits on marketing rather than technology, adversaries stealing encrypted data as a long game, and what happens when boards start making decisions on synthetic confidence.

Her closing advice for leaders: get very comfortable with being uncomfortable, and go looking for the sources you’d normally avoid.

About Anna:

Keywords: AI strategy, CISO, board of directors, CEO, cybersecurity leadership, event-driven strategy, strategic thinking, synthetic confidence, AI bias, go-to-market, vendor marketing, Symantec, SBOM, harvest now decrypt later, cybersecurity podcast

Recorded at Cisco Live 2026 in Las Vegas, where 20,000 operators, engineers and executives gathered at Mandalay Bay to shape the future of networking, AI and cybersecurity. KB sits down with two Cisco leaders confronting the problems AI is creating and the infrastructure built to outlast them. Tom Gillis, SVP and GM of Cisco’s Infrastructure and Security Group, explains why the gap between a vulnerability being disclosed and exploited has collapsed from months to hours, and how Live Protect shields critical flaws between patches with no reboot and no downtime. Then Ramana Kompella, Head of Cisco Research and Cisco Fellow, makes the case for quantum networking over ever bigger quantum computers, unpacks the new Universal Quantum Switch, and explains why “harvest now, decrypt later” makes quantum safe infrastructure a today decision, not a 2029 one.

Key topics: AI accelerated exploitation, vulnerability shielding and Live Protect, continuous infrastructure updates and digital twins, quantum networking, the Universal Quantum Switch, post quantum cryptography and CNSA 2.0, and the harvest now decrypt later threat.

John leads customer success, presales, and professional services across APAC at Workato and serves as Field CTO for the region. With more than twenty-five years of experience, including roles at Oracle and TIBCO and as co-founder of Rubicon Red, he focuses on helping enterprises unlock real, lasting value from AI and integration.

In this episode of KBKast, John joins KB to unpack why 42% of AI initiatives were abandoned in 2025, up from 17% the year before, and why the answer isn’t the technology. It’s trust.

John explains why AI is a bigger deal than cloud ever was: what used to be storage and processing is now decision and action inside core enterprise systems. He takes aim at “governance theater,” the steering committees and policy documents that create a feeling of control while nobody can actually see what an agent is doing. And he lands the warning every security leader needs to hear: you got away with over-provisioning access for humans, because humans never went looking. Agents will.

Also covered: the tokenomics panic, 700% month-on-month cost blowouts, why AI shouldn’t re-map a purchase order every single time, who owns the agent when things go wrong, and why a central control plane is the only way to govern agents at scale.

Keywords: AI agents, agentic AI, AI governance, governance theater, enterprise AI, AI security, control plane, observability, MCP, tokenomics, AI cost management, AI strategy, CISO, agent permissions, Workato, shadow AI, AI ROI, autonomous agents

KB grabs the mic backstage at SPHERE 2026 by Atmos for two conversations that sit on either end of the same problem: how leaders should be thinking about risk in an unstable world, and what it actually looks like when a sector has been living that instability for years.

First up, KB sits down with Chris Krebs, former Director of the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). They get into the CISA cuts making headlines, why old assumptions baked into risk registers no longer hold, and the five cracks Chris sees forming in the foundation of modern risk management. He also breaks down why boards need to push vendors harder on third-party risk, and why cyber has become the opening move in every modern conflict.

Then Tom Huth, Specialist in Energy Market Cyber Incident Coordination at AEMO, and Ryan McLaren, co-founder and COO of Retrospect Labs, bring it back to ground level. They unpack why the energy sector’s tight-knit supply chain has made it a genuine leader in cyber resilience, the difference between a tabletop exercise and a full functional simulation, and the trust problem nobody’s fully solved: how do you verify who’s really on the other end of the phone when your systems go down? A grounded look at what it takes to build real muscle memory before the bad day arrives.