What security leaders said, week 43

October 19, 2026 to October 25, 2026 · 14 entries from 9 leaders

Themes in our own words, drawn up on October 23, 2026 while the week was still running from our labels and titles only, never from the posts themselves. Every person here is someone our record names as the current holder of a top security seat; role and company come from our record.

CISO Leadership Insights

Posts and a podcast cover a technology company security chief sharing leadership lessons and engagement practices.

October 22, 2026· LinkedIn post
Rinki Sethi, Chief Security Officer (CSO) at Upwind
On CISO engagement with sales and leadership
Read on LinkedIn ↗
October 20, 2026· Podcast appearance, The San Francisco Tribune
CJ Moses, Chief Information Security Officer and VP of Security Engineering at Amazon
On security leadership lessons from a major tech company's security chief
Terra Security Podcast Debut: Six Lessons From Amazon CISO CJ Moses
Listen at The San Francisco Tribune ↗

AI In Security Operations

Content examines artificial intelligence effects on vulnerability discovery and introduces an AI focused security podcast series.

October 21, 2026· X post · @_mwc
Michael Coates, Chief Information Security Officer at Solana Foundation
On AI's impact on vulnerability discovery and exploitation trends
Read on X ↗
October 20, 2026· Podcast appearance, TNW | Contributed
CJ Moses, Chief Information Security Officer and VP of Security Engineering at Amazon
On an AI-driven cybersecurity podcast launch featuring a prominent security executive
Amazon CISO CJ Moses opens Terra Security’s AI cybersecurity podcast
Our takeOpinion
The CISO and VP of Security Engineering at Amazon is the seat behind this opening episode of a new AI-focused cybersecurity podcast. The episode covers how AI compresses the time between initial access and takeover, honeypot intelligence feeding patching priorities, security scanning inside delivery pipelines, North Korean applicants using AI-built personas, and measuring exposure rather than counting vulnerabilities. We agree that the useful metric is time from discovery to mitigation, and we would go further by tracking it per exposure class, since a quick fix to an edge service says little about a slow one in a legacy system. Mitigation should be pre-authorised: if blocking access or isolating a host needs a committee, the window closes before anyone convenes. The identity thread deserves more attention than it usually gets, because hiring screens, access provisioning and insider-risk work often sit in different teams, and AI-built personas exploit exactly those seams. We would also test the claim that continuous validation can run without slowing delivery against your own pipelines before copying the model. Watch whether later episodes show how speed of response is measured in practice.
Written from the episode's published description. How we write these
Listen at TNW | Contributed ↗

Security Community Reflections

General posts touch on cybersecurity topics, professional camaraderie, leadership themes, and blue team awareness practices.

October 21, 2026· LinkedIn post
Natalia Oropeza, Global Chief Cybersecurity Officer at Siemens
On cybersecurity
Read on LinkedIn ↗
October 21, 2026· LinkedIn post
Eric Freeman, Chief Information Security Officer at WRITER
On security professionals' shared experiences and camaraderie
Read on LinkedIn ↗
October 20, 2026· LinkedIn post
Sean Cassidy, Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) at Plaid
On a security leadership topic
Read on LinkedIn ↗
October 20, 2026· LinkedIn post
Rinki Sethi, Chief Security Officer (CSO) at Upwind
On cybersecurity awareness and blue team practices
Read on LinkedIn ↗

Pop Culture Mentions

A post discusses a tire brand's appearance within a popular video game and gaming culture.

October 19, 2026· LinkedIn post
Thomas Dager, Vice President and Chief Information Security Officer at The Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company
On the Goodyear brand's presence in GTA 6 and gaming culture
Read on LinkedIn ↗

Also this week

5 entries added to the record after these themes were drawn up.

October 23, 2026· LinkedIn post
Patti Degnan, Chief Information Security Officer at Glow
On a cybersecurity conference award recognition
Read on LinkedIn ↗
October 22, 2026· X post · @alexstamos
Alex Stamos, Chief Information Security Officer at Cognition
On PHP and Node vulnerability remediation
Read on X ↗
October 21, 2026· LinkedIn post
CJ Moses, Chief Information Security Officer and VP of Security Engineering at Amazon
On PHP-based web shell threats identified by Amazon threat intelligence
Read on LinkedIn ↗
October 21, 2026· LinkedIn post
Michael Coates, Chief Information Security Officer at Solana Foundation
On AI-driven vulnerability discovery trends
Our takeOpinion
AI-driven vulnerability discovery is changing the arithmetic of defence for any security leader whose patching and triage processes were sized for a slower flow of findings. The opening of this post points to a surge in what AI tooling is turning up, and little more is visible beyond that framing. Our view is that the pressure lands less on detection than on everything downstream: deduplication, exploitability assessment, ownership routing and remediation capacity, which rarely scale at the speed of a model. Programmes should expect findings to outpace fixes and decide now which classes of issue get automated triage, which still need a human, and how much risk they will knowingly carry in the gap. We would also assume attackers are running the same tools, which shortens the window between disclosure and exploitation and makes reachability and asset context worth more than raw counts.
Written from the post's public search excerpt, not the full post. How we write these
Read on LinkedIn ↗
October 21, 2026· LinkedIn post
Sean Cassidy, Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) at Plaid
On cybersecurity awareness
Our takeOpinion
The CISO of Plaid, whose appointment was announced in June 2026 and who arrived from the head of security role at Asana, opens a post on cybersecurity awareness by noting that recent events may have made it harder for anyone to ignore. A bad stretch in the news does raise attention, and that attention is real, but it fades quickly and rarely turns into lasting behaviour. We would treat a noisy month as a short window to ask for what awareness alone cannot supply: funding for phishing-resistant authentication, cleaner offboarding, tested incident drills, and a plain channel for staff to report mistakes without blame. Where we would add caution is in measuring success by how well people recall headlines, since attackers go after process gaps more than ignorance. Awareness is the opening, and the programme work that follows is what decides whether it was worth having.
Written from the post's public search excerpt, not the full post. How we write these
Read on LinkedIn ↗