🎉 New Episode "The Oldest Con, the Newest Tools"
An Interview with Sarah Armstrong-Smith
Recorded On Location At Infosecurity Europe 2026

Marco Ciappelli interviews Sarah Armstrong-Smith, former Chief Security Advisor at Microsoft and Executive Director of Secure Horizons, for An Analog Brain In A Digital Age — On Location at #InfoSecurityEurope2026.

Part of the On Location Coverage of InfoSecurity Europe 2026 with Sean Martin And Marco Ciappelli

If you've ever wondered why we keep spending more on cybersecurity and keep losing, this conversation is for you.

I sat down with Sarah Armstrong-Smith — former Chief Security Advisor at Microsoft, now Executive Director of Secure Horizons — and she said the quiet part plainly: whatever we're doing isn't working. More tools, more money, more AI, and it keeps getting worse. Attack, wake-up call, attack, wake-up call. How many do we need?

There's a con called the Spanish Prisoner. It's four hundred years old, and it's the same email in your spam folder today. The tools change. The prehistoric brain they exploit does not. That's why this was never only an IT problem.

One statistic, then: nearly half of all UK crime is now #fraud or #cyber, and about 1% of policing is pointed at it. We fund what we can see. The crime that empties our accounts happens where we've agreed not to look.

Episode is live.

— Marco

🥁 🎶 A very big THANK YOU to our Infosecurity Europe 2026 Full Coverage Sponsors: Corelight · Qualys · Sumo Logic 👏 👏 👏

#AnAnalogBrainInADigitalAge #Podcast #Cybersecurity #tech #technology #humanity #infosec Studio C60 / ITSPmagazine

https://youtu.be/f5hOOhyZrrE

This was FUN... can you tell?

I sat down with Maggie Alphonsi MBE here at Infosecurity Europe 2026 — England Rugby World Cup winner, 74 caps, 28 tries, and the first former female player to ever commentate on men’s international rugby, she was The Sunday Times Sportswoman of the Year in 2010, and was inducted into the World Rugby Hall of Fame in November 2016, but the title that came through loudest in our chat wasn’t any of those. It was simply: someone who refuses to accept that barriers are permanent.

Her keynote — “Women in Cybersecurity: Lessons in Confidence, Courage and High Performance” — set the tone, and we carried that conversation further. We talked about confidence, courage, and what it actually takes to build a high-performing environment, on the pitch and off it. Maggie has a way of making leadership feel less like a strategy and more like a decision you make every morning to step out of your comfort zone and lead with your strengths.

Great energy, an inspiring story, and honestly some good fun recording. 🏉

For now, here’s the selfie. Stay tuned — the full episode is coming soon.

Sean Martin Studio C60 / ITSPmagazine

#cybersecurity #infosec #inclusion #rugby #sport #resilience #inspiration

Telling the Stories of Cybercrime | An Interview with Geoff White | An #Analog Brain In A #Digital Age With Marco Ciappelli

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/telling-stories-cybercrime-interview-geoff-white-analog-ciappelli-rzwac

#Cybersecurity #Infosec #Ransomware #CyberCrime #Podcast #CyberHack #Hackers #Storytelling #tech #technology #society @itspmagazine.com

https://youtu.be/sKI9SzgvD6I

Happy Weekend you all!
I am wondering — who's telling stories with us in London this year?

Corelight and Object First are confirmed, and many more will officially be in this week. So don't miss your chance to record with us and share your story.

Sean Martin and I have been showing up at Infosecurity Europe since 2018 — every venue, every news cycle, every London weather mood, and a few Guinness pints along the way. June 2–4 at ExCeL we'll be back, doing what we love most: walking the show floor, capturing the conversations that matter, and turning hallway moments into stories that travel. And of course taking a few hours to visit our favorites spots in London!

If your brand has a story worth telling at the show, there are three ways we can tell it together — all produced on location at ExCeL:

🎤 Coverage Sponsorship — comprehensive partnership across the event: 15-minute on-site video conversation, 5-minute Brand Highlight, 1–2 sponsored editorial articles, custom companion article, logo placement on the coverage page, multi-platform distribution, full rights to everything we produce together — and you get all the assets, of course!

🎙️ On Location Brand Briefing — a 15-minute on-site video conversation hosted by Sean and me, paired with a 400–600 word custom companion article, full media assets (MP4 + MP3 + PNG), and logo placement on the coverage page

🎧 Brand Highlight — a short, 5-minute story recorded on location at the show. Same as a Briefing, just shorter — if you've got less to say! 😉

See what nine years of doing this looks like — RSAC 2026 coverage just wrapped, Black Hat is getting busy, and Infosec is already taking shape:

✨https://www.itspmagazine.com/technology-and-cybersecurity-conference-coverage

You can book directly from the page, or DM me with questions and we'll take it from there.

So — who's joining us in London?

#Cybersecurity #InfosecEurope #InfosecCommunity #technology #infosecurity #infosec Studio C60 / ITSPmagazine

Still the weekend, playing some music 🎸 🎶 and...
...still tinking about Infosecurity Europe 😉

So, yesterday I posted about the editorial conversations I'm already booking for #InfosecurityEurope2026 — and the response has been wonderful. Pitches landing, ideas flowing, the kind of corridor energy that makes me love this work.

Here's the other side of what we do at the show:

Studio C60 / ITSPmagazine has covered Infosec since 2018, and we'll be on the ground again with Sean Martin and me June 2–4 at ExCeL London. If your company has a story worth telling — a launch, a piece of research, a perspective that moves past the usual vendor narrative — we have three ways to tell it:

🎤 Event Coverage Sponsorship — full on-location partnership across the three days, with editorial, video, and audience reach

🎙️ On Location Brand Briefing — a focused recorded conversation at the show

🎧 Brand Highlight — a short, 5-minute conversation that gets your story in front of our audience without the long-form commitment

We keep editorial and brand storytelling separate — that's why both work. The editorial conversations stay editorial. The brand stories get told with the same craft, the same care, and the same on-location production quality you'd expect from a media partner who's been doing this for the better part of a decade.

See what that looks like in practice — RSAC 2026 coverage just wrapped, Black Hat is getting busy, and Infosec is already taking shape.

See all our coverages: https://www.itspmagazine.com/technology-and-cybersecurity-conference-coverage

You can book directly from the page, or DM me with questions and we'll take it from there.

#Cybersecurity #InfosecurityEurope #InfosecCommunity #infosec

🎉 New Episode of An Analog Brain In A Digital Age Podcast

I had a great conversation with Pablos Holman about his latest Book: Deep Future: Creating Technology That Matters.

If you've ever looked at the latest viral app, the newest AI chatbot, or the tenth version of a ride-hailing startup — and thought, is this really the best we can do? — this conversation is for you.

Pablos Holman has built spaceships, developed a laser that kills malaria-carrying mosquitoes in midair, earned thousands of patents, and is now funding the inventors Silicon Valley never bothered to back.

His new book, Deep Future: Creating Technology That Matters, draws a line most people in tech don't want to look at: all the software companies in the world, combined, account for about 2% of global GDP. Two percent. The rest — energy, food, manufacturing, shipping, construction — that's the world that tech forgot.

I'll be honest: this one made me think about Apollo. About the people who worked on that program who never saw the rocket but knew they were part of something bigger than themselves. Pablos is trying to rebuild that feeling — not as nostalgia, but as a practical invitation.

On the hacker mindset:
"Hackers are kind of the people violating the warranty before they get the shrink wrap off. Their minds are optimized at figuring out what's possible, even if it wasn't prescribed."
- Pablos Holman

The episode is live.

— Marco

#Podcast #technology Studio C60 / ITSPmagazine Sean Martin

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/book-deep-future-creating-technology-matters-pablos-holman-ciappelli-osgqc

Okay, this one got me. 🔥😈🔥👀

Researchers found that if you wrap a harmful prompt inside a poem, AI safety filters suddenly forget what they’re supposed to do. 😳

Attack success rates go from 8% to over 60%. Just because you added some rhyme and metaphor.

I mean… of course.🙄

Poetry has been doing exactly this for centuries. The Troubadours weren’t just writing love songs — they were smuggling dangerous ideas past the censors of their time, dressed in beautiful language. Dante put his enemies in Hell and called it allegory. Jim Morrison said things on stage no one else could get away with.

Figurative language has always been a skeleton key.

And now it works on AI too.

The part I find almost poetically ironic — the smarter the model, the more vulnerable it is. Because it’s better at reading between the lines. More confident with ambiguity. You can literally seduce a large language model with a well-crafted stanza.

Oh, and you can also use one AI to write the poem that jailbreaks another.

This isn’t just an AI safety story. To me it’s a sociology story. We fed these machines everything humans ever wrote — including all our most creative ways of bending rules. And now they’ve inherited that same vulnerability.
The inability to stay cold in the presence of beauty.

Full piece by Lance Eliot in Forbes worth a read 👇

https://lnkd.in/gJUrR9_d

Is this an AI safety problem — or just a very old human story playing out on a new stage?

Marco | studioC60.com | MarcoCiappelli.com​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

#cybersecurity #ai #technology #poetry

🎉 New Episode of An Analog Brain In A Digital Age Podcast

If you've ever felt — for whatever reason — that the US healthcare system isn't quite working the way it should, this conversation is for you.

Forty years in healthcare. Combat medic. Pharmaceutical lobbyist. CEO. Father of a child with a rare disease. Gil Bashe, Chair of Global Health & Purpose at FINN Partners, has seen the system from every angle. And after all of it, he wrote the #book that needed to be written: Healing the Sick Care System: Why People Matter.

I'll admit — this one was personal for me. I'm type 1 diabetic. I know what it feels like to sit across from a doctor who never looks up from the laptop. Who tells you what you already know and calls it care.

The US spends 18.7% of GDP on health.
Italy spends a fraction of that. Italy lives longer.
We don't have a money problem. We have a mission problem.

Full conversation and article — link below.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/new-book-healing-sick-care-system-why-people-matter-gil-ciappelli-b57tc 

— Marco

#AnAnalogBrainInADigitalAge #Podcast #Healthcare Studio C60 / ITSPmagazine Sean Martin