Mirren McDade

“I’d rather be measured on how fast we found the problem and how well we contained it, not on a perfect record no organization our size has ever achieved,” says John J. Masserini, founder of SentiCon Security. Masserini spent two decades in the CISO role at three organizations that had little in common. At Dow Jones and News Corp he ran security for the Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, and MarketWatch.

The CISO role is hitting a breaking point. Responsibilities keep expanding, while the authority and support to manage them often don’t. Trying to personally own detection, reporting, and compliance without the authority or the peer network to match is almost impossible. This is what burns people out and increasingly pushes them out. We’ve spoken to dozens of CISOs as part of Expert Insights’ CISO Q&A series over the past year.

With artificial intelligence (AI) giving threat actors new ways to hack defenses and exfiltrate data with unprecedented speed and efficiency, defense teams are scrambling for ways to catch up in this brave new world, with many turning to AI itself in the fight for supremacy.