“Culture eats cyber strategy for breakfast”: Notes from 813 Tech Day’s Security Panel

A show of hands Host Michael Hall started by asking everyone who runs a company or product that touches money, customer data, or both to raise their hands. Some hands went up, which wasn’t surprising. Then he asked: “Keep them up if you have a single person whose actual job is nothing but security.” All hands down. And that moment was the panel in summary. A room full of people founding or working at companies (or hoping to found and work at them) handling money and PII, and essentially zero dedicated security headcount among them. To be fair, a number of them were solopreneurs. Still, Michael’s follow-up question was an important one: “So what are you going to do about cyber warfare?” Introducing the panel The panel had unusually good coverage of the problem space: economic development, defense-grade compliance, offensive security, and someone who actually runs a bank. They were, from left to right onstage: Alexei “Alex” Chirokikh, CTO of Waterfall Bank, with a couple of decades of…