I work at the intersection of cyber defense, AI safety, and emerging risk, where the threats are converging and the playbooks are still being written.

My career has taken me from the Marine Corps to NSA, U.S. Cyber Command, the U.S. House of Representatives, Mandiant, and Netflix. Across every role, one throughline: understanding adversaries, building high-trust teams, and translating complex problems into strategies leaders can act on.

Today, I advise organizations, governments, and research institutions on AI governance, agentic threat preparedness, and unifying safety and security into a single discipline. I contribute to global standards efforts including the EU AI Act (via OWASP AI) and lead executive education on cybersecurity and AI strategy at SANS.

If you’re navigating the future of AI risk or security strategy, let’s connect.

Chris Cochran

This room was electric.

Just wrapped my Agentic Identity talk / BoF at [un]prompted, and honestly, having some of the best minds in AI security in one room was a highlight of the conference. We didn’t keep it high-level, we went deep into the architecture of the future.

Several of the folks in the room did research that started my own journey, or are actively tackling this same challenge:
Ken Adler, John Yeoh, Toby Kohlenberg He/Him, Charles Nwatu, Rob T. Lee, and Olivia Gallucci, just to name a few.

The conversation pushed into some big questions:

• The Agent Era: What does identity look like when the “user” isn’t human but can sometimesact like one?
• Authorization: How do we solve who can do what in a generative world?
• The Infrastructure Question: Centralized platforms, blockchain experiments, or an inevitable hybrid?

The questions from the room were next-level.

Huge thanks to Gadi Evron, Sounil Yu, and the entire [un]prompted team for creating space for these conversations.

I’ll share a deeper recap (and a few emerging answers) soon.

Field CISO & VP, AI Security @ SANS | Bridging Cyber Defense and Frontier AI Risk | Ex-NSA, Netflix, Mandiant | US Marine Veteran

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Programs like this can change a career forever.

Honored to be a small part of this amazing program.

https://lnkd.in/ghuY7wiG

Women in CyberSecurity (WiCyS) SANS Institute Foster Nethercott Mari DeGrazia Maxwell Shuftan Tyler Corcoran Kajal Shelat

Open article: Women in CyberSecurity (WiCyS) Launches AI Security Accelerator Program for Maryland Members by finance.yahoo.com

Women in CyberSecurity (WiCyS) Launches AI Security Accelerator Program for Maryland Members

Excited to be in San Francisco for the first-ever [un]prompted Conference.

It’s encouraging to see a room full of practitioners leaning into the evolving discipline of AI security, particularly around agentic systems, identity, and workforce readiness. Not long ago, this wasn’t even a defined field. That’s wild.

If you’re here and interested in thoughtful conversations about securing what’s next, including what we’re seeing globally and how the SANS Institute is supporting the community, I’d welcome the exchange.

Strong work by Gadi Evron, Sounil Yu, and the team bringing this together.

A few years ago, I was done with security. Burned out. Two decades of the same circuit, same panels, same predictions. The people closest to me knew it.

Then AI pulled me back from the dead.

I just spent a week at [un]prompted in San Francisco, and I walked away changed. Not inspired in the vague, conference-high, shallow influencer, kind of way- changed in the "I was wrong about seven things and I'm all in" kind of way.

Wrong about the sidelines. Wrong about the hype. Wrong about whether anyone else saw what was coming.

In my latest article, I break down all seven, plus standout work from folks like Nicholas Carlini at Anthropic, Heather Adkins and John "Four" Flynn at Google, Olivia Gallucci at Datadog, and Scott Behrens and Justice Cassel from Netflix security team, all building the future of AI security in real time.

I even had a bit of a surprise guest spot.

This is our Industrial Revolution, folks. And the rules are still being written.

Check out the seven things I was wrong about below.

Gadi Evron Sounil Yu Ida Vass

I'm a student of history, business, and technology. Always have been. For years, I looked back at the Industrial Revolution, at the dawn of the intern

Open article: 7 Things I Was Proven Wrong About AI Security at the [un]prompted Conference by Chris Cochran • 7 min read

7 Things I Was Proven Wrong About AI Security at the [un]prompted Conference

I’m honored to join Pentera’s AI Security Exposure Survey 2026 Webinar alongside Ryan Dorey, Director of Technical Advisors at Pentera, where we’ll unpack the real deal from the benchmark data revealing how organizations are navigating the security challenges of rapid AI adoption. 

What we’re seeing in the data is pretty straightforward, but some insights will surprise you:

Legacy controls are being stretched to cover AI-driven workflows.
Teams are being asked to secure systems they didn’t design and may not fully understand.
And in many cases, organizations don’t have a clear way to validate AI risk before an attacker does it for them.

In this session, we’re going to have a very practical conversation about that.

We’ll cover:

• How the benchmark was built and what 300 CISOs are actually saying
• Real examples of how AI security gaps become exploitable exposure
• Where adversarial testing fits in, across data, identity, and infrastructure

It’s about closing the gap between AI adoption and real-world security validation.

Join us by registering with the link in the comments.

No industry faces the complexity of AI adoption quite like healthcare. Getting it wrong is measured in revenue but more importantly, it’s measured in outcomes, in trust, and in lives.

That’s what makes the conversations happening right now so critical.

What gave me genuine optimism was seeing security teams and IT leaders speaking with one voice, not just asking “How do we protect the organization from AI threats?” but going further. 

Acknowledging that AI carries extraordinary promise and meaningful risk, and that moving forward demands intentionality above all else.
The next 12–18 months will be defining. 

Organizations that build governance frameworks, align stakeholders, and treat security as a design principle will earn lasting trust. Those that move recklessly won’t get a second chance.

I’m encouraged by an industry leaning in with both urgency and discipline. That balance is rare. It’s also exactly what this moment requires.
Thank you to SANS Institute, HIMSS, and the healthcare community for creating a space where these conversations can happen with the seriousness they deserve.

The work continues.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

It was great to see the masterful Chris Wilkes work his magic in another Crisis Exercise. Amanda Burdey, GISF, GSTRT and I got to do a bit of acting in support. 

It was also a pleasant surprise to see Maria Graham. I still am and will always be jealous of your friend group. So cool to see.

#HIMSS26

Want to see how AI can automate absolutely everything in the SOC?

Then this is not the talk for you.

On March 18th, I’m joining my dear friend Nathan Burke from 7AI for a SANS Institute webcast “Don’t Trust AI – Verify It: A Practical Discussion About AI in the SOC”  and we’re not here to sugarcoat anything.

We’ll be getting into:
• Why agentic AI systems are introducing risks most orgs aren’t ready for
• What “verify, don’t trust” actually looks like in practice inside the SOC

If you’re leading security strategy in an AI-first world, this conversation is one to check out. 

No fluff, no vendor pitches just two crazy tech guys with slightly too much energy, who care deeply about getting this right. 

Get your spot in the comments below.

If you know Kate Marshall, you know she is someone who legitimately wants to give value to everyone in her atmosphere. 

This book is pure value for those looking to bring AI into their personal or professional lives.

I’m proud of Kate, not only for this masterclass of a book, but for stepping into to the arena and arriving like a force to be reckoned with.

Grab your copy here: https://a.co/d/02rpuPWV

Great to be back with our special operations community this week at SOFWERX for C2DS. We focused on the intersection of agentic security and prompt engineering, specifically how these technologies can be weaponized as tactical force multipliers for the mission.

As the threat evolves, ensuring our elite operators have a competitive edge is paramount. It was a privilege to contribute to the mission and spend time with the professionals dedicated to keeping this country safe.

Thanks for making this week awesome Kerry Rock, Luke Leviner, and Foster Nethercott. 

Semper Fi.

Last week I sat down with 300 CISOs worth of data and one question kept echoing in my head: How is it possible that 100% of enterprises have adopted AI, and zero percent have full visibility into it?

I hosted a live session last week with Ryan Dorey from Pentera, digging into their AI Security & Exposure Benchmark 2026. What came out of it was one of the most honest, unfiltered conversations I've had about where enterprise AI security actually stands right now.

A few things that stopped me cold:

→ Only 11% have purpose-built AI security tooling, the rest are stretching legacy controls to cover attack surfaces they were never designed for
→ 50% of CISOs cite lack of internal expertise as their # 1 barrier, not budget
→ Shadow AI isn't some edge case. It's the default condition in most enterprises right now

And the one that always keeps me up at night: we are in the calm before the storm.

Autonomous agents that don't sleep. Attack paths that are 80-90% automated. An 11-year-old with access to a sophisticated offensive agent isn't science fiction, my friends.

I wrote up a bit from the session, the data, the real-world attack scenario we walked through, and what I'd tell every security leader to focus on today.

Link to the full article. 👇

What's the biggest AI security challenge you're navigating right now? I'd genuinely love to hear it.

Last week I had the privilege of joining Ryan Dorey from Pentera to dig into their freshly released AI Security & Exposure Benchmark 2026 - a survey o

Open article: The 100/0 Problem: Every Enterprise Has AI. None Have Full Visibility Into It. by Chris Cochran • 6 min read

The 100/0 Problem: Every Enterprise Has AI. None Have Full Visibility Into It.

I was fortunate enough to contribute to this CSO Online piece on how CISOs are rethinking data protection in the AI era.

The core challenge I keep coming back to: AI-driven data exposure doesn't look or feel like exfiltration. Employees paste source code and customer data into consumer models, thinking they're being productive,  not realizing the risk. Add expanding data sovereignty rules, AI-specific regulatory guidance, and post-quantum encryption on the horizon, and you understand why this has become a board-level conversation.

Shoutout to the other security leaders and practitioners featured in the article by Mary K. Pratt, lots of practical thinking in here worth your time.

Link in the comments.

It was an honor to hang out with my buddy Christopher Luft to chat all things AI in security.

Thanks LimaCharlie and SANS Institute for facilitating the conversation.

AI skill gaps are a real conversation right now, and Chris Cochran, Field CISO and VP of AI Security at SANS Institute, breaks it down into three practical buckets for defenders who want to stay ahead.

Start by figuring out what you can offload to AI: summarization, enrichment, repetitive tasks. Save the deterministic decisions for humans.

Then learn how to secure AI itself:

> Agent-to-agent communications
> MCP server security
> OWASP Top 10 for agents

Finally, understand governance. Not just the technical side, but what your company is actually trying to do with AI. Security practitioners who can enable the business, not just protect it, become irreplaceable.

Listen to the full episode: https://lc.pub/4s7iL4V

#cybersecurity #ai #podcast

I’m incredibly proud of the work we’ve put into the latest OWASP AIVSS Project update. Still pinching myself about being involved with some of the most respected leaders in our industry.

OWASP AIVSS Project 
OWASP AI Exchange 
SANS Institute

The AI Exchange is proud to co-publish this magnificent OWASP AIVSS Project update. Credits to all experts and for the OWASP AI Exchange: Behnaz Karimi, Chris Cochran, Miracle Owolabi, with supporting: Alex Leung and Srajan Gupta.

#ai #aisecurity

Robert Wood

CISO | Servant Leader | Advisor | Lifelong Student (posts here are my own opinions and musings)

I have built, scaled, and run security programs as a CISO at 4 different organizations ranging from small tech startups to trillion dollar government organizations. The early part of my career was spent working in application security and red teaming. Cybersecurity is a passion of mine; using it to do amazing things is something that gets me fired up.

That’s why I founded Sidekick Security. To help organizations achieve security-led growth and digital transformations. In an age of trust as currency in so many industries, I believe this is the time when security truly can be an enabler. 

Beyond that, I am a lifelong learner. I love studying outside of my field and finding ways to expand the mental models I have to solve problems differently, more effectively, or to think about them in altogether new and fresh ways. 

Founder and CEO

Helping to connect SMBs and startups with exceptional security talent. A fresh, blue ocean strategy on the cyber security services market for organizations that really need it. 

The U.S. just made a few moves that as a red teamer and CISO, constitute a noteworthy shift in attack surface and risk posture.

And in part, we did it to ourselves.

Move 1: We gutted our biggest defense team.
CISA, the agency literally built to coordinate US cyber defense is operating at 38% staffing as of last month. Down from 3,400 to 2,400 people before the shutdown even hit. The counter-ransomware program? Gone. The acting associate director of the cybersecurity division? Resigning March 6. During an active conflict.

Move 2: We ripped out some of our best AI tooling.
The administration ordered every federal agency to immediately stop using AI tooling built by Anthropic, arguably the industry leader in AI capabilities and safety. The reason? Anthropic refused to let the Pentagon use its models for mass surveillance of Americans and autonomous weapons without guardrails. So now every federal agency and the DIB is moving to make non-trivial changes under the hood wherever Claude is used.

Move 3: The adversary went kinetic.
This is a big one...Iranian drones physically destroyed AWS data centers in the UAE and Bahrain on March 2. Banking systems went down. Payment processing stopped. Enterprise services across the Middle East reportedly went offline. This isn't a theoretical tabletop scenario. This happened four days ago. Our risk registers tend to think and operate in technical risk only, not accounting for environmental or kinetic issues, but this is very real.

Here's what I think should terrify every security leader reading this:

These aren't three separate stories. They're one story.
The US simultaneously reduced its human cyber defense capacity by 62%, removed the AI company that actually had safety principles from its toolkit, and watched a nation-state prove that cloud infrastructure is physically destroyable (or at least disruptable).

If you're running a security program right now, this is cause for some real conversation. The coordination layer you assumed would be there during a national incident is running on fumes so you may not be able to count on that resource like you expected. The AI tools the government is switching to were chosen for compliance or ease of contracting, not capability.

You should be planning to roll up your sleeves and get ready.

That means your detection has to be faster. Your response has to be automated. Your supply chain needs a threat-based perspective, not more questionnaires. Your resilience can't depend on a single cloud provider, a single government agency, or a single vendor's political alignment.

The organizations that thrive over the next couple of years, in my opinion won't be the ones waiting for federal guidance or seeing how the dust settles. They'll be the ones who build AI-native security stacks to complement their human teams. 

And it's only Wednesday! 

#ciso #aisecurity #nationalsecurity #cybersecurity

Helping CISOs and CIOs navigate their own cybersecurity transformations | Former Federal CISO

I almost got trampled by a bunch of horses last night bringing them in during the storm, here's what that taught me about cybersecurity.

...

...

Nothing! Those kinds of posts are ridiculous. That said, horses are funny, don't let your AI sessions let you think you're invincible out there once you get up from your comfy keyboard chair 😀 

#resiliency #ai

This won't be a sexy problem post.

With so many organizations aggressively adopting AI for everything from software engineering to content creation, I feel it's even more important today to ensure that you have human-driven or at least human-in-the-loop playbooks for things like incident response, business continuity, and disaster recovery. 

Like I said...definitely not sexy. 

But when your new vibe coding CS team ends up trashing production data or when your rogue, openclaw screws some key customer integration up, what do you do? 

Do you vibe respond your way out of it? How will that go over when you're catching questions from the board? 

#cybersecurity #aisecurity #businesscontinuity #incidentresponse

One of the most humbling things I've ever done professionally was go to a crypto conference around the time when SHA-3 was being reviewed. Slides full of intense math with active debates around the approaches. 

Now fast forward here we are...One of the most unfortunate things about this AI madness is that we are collectively not talking about some of the other major issues facing us.

For a very real example, the post-quantum crypto conversation is actively shifting from academic to practice. Encrypted data from two years ago is sitting in an adversary's storage cluster somewhere. They can't read it yet. They're waiting.

"Harvest now, decrypt later" is already happening per the NSA and CISA. Nation-state actors are collecting TLS sessions, VPN traffic, and encrypted transfers today, betting that cryptographically relevant quantum computers exist before 2035. NSS compliance requires migration to NIST-approved PQC algorithms by January 2027. Most organizations haven't inventoried their cryptographic dependencies, let alone sequenced a migration. 

We're already almost in Q2 of 2026. 

PQC migration is harder than most security projects because you can't patch your way through it. Discovery is the first problem, every system using RSA or ECDH for key exchange needs to be found, catalogued, and prioritized by data sensitivity and longevity. Since we've done such a crap job of basic asset management in nearly every other cyber-discipline, I imagine this is going to be a long pole in the tent. Hybrid cryptography (running classical and post-quantum algorithms in parallel) will buy time on external-facing systems while teams work through internal dependencies. But migration validation isn't a trivial issue, swapping cryptographic primitives can quietly break things that were working fine.

I suspect the organizations that will struggle most are the ones starting their discovery late. If an organization already struggles with basic discovery in other areas, it's likely this will be compounded. 

#ciso #ai #pqc #postquantum

Appsec went from one of the more bespoke disciplines in cyber to a near ubiquitous one.

The new BSIMM report still benchmarks software security maturity across organizations that think of themselves as software companies, those who are “writing software”. That frame is starting to crack though and quickly. When your finance team is building internal tools with Copilot, your ops team is shipping Python scripts with Codex, and your sales team is building wrappers around the GTM stack, you’re a software organization whether you planned for it or not.

The uncomfortable part isn’t that the code is bad (though often it is). It’s that most of these organizations have zero AppSec infrastructure around it. No code review. No SDLC. No threat modeling. Not even a basic inventory of what’s being built and deployed. No culture around building secure and resilient software.

The attack surface just exploded and security programs are still stuck on corpsec, GRC, running the SOC and so on.

BSIMM has always been valuable because it gives you a mirror, not a prescription. I got to live that up close during my time with Cigital. But the cohort it reflects is about to change dramatically over the next couple years. The organizations that need AppSec programs the most now are the ones that would never have shown up in a BSIMM assessment a few years ago.

If your org has AI coding tools in the hands of non-engineers, you already have an AppSec problem. You just might not have found it yet.

#bsimm #appsec #ai #aisecurity #ciso

A lot of the work our team has been doing around agentic security lately hasn't been "how do we prevent compromise?"

It's been all about sorting out how exposed "we" are if something does go wrong. This attack surface with AI is changing so quickly, I firmly believe pulling the focus back to sound platform and architecture design is key. 

This GlassWorm malware spent the first two weeks of March reportedly hitting over 400 repositories across Python, npm, and VSCode by poisoning the tooling that agents and developers both pull from. An agent ingesting a compromised dependency isn't a jailbroken model, it's a trusted process running a hostile payload. It's similar to your APIs pulling untrusted content and passing into databases or the user browser in a traditional appsec sense. 

Make that faster...autonomous systems don't pause between tool calls for an analyst to clear an alert. By the time detection fires (if it ever does because let's be real, monitoring is not ubiquitous), the tool chain has already run.

The threat model exercise worth doing for every agent in production is to assume full context window control. What can the attacker do? That answer drives real decisions from:
- Agent-specific service accounts scoped to what the agent needs (not the whole org)
- External API calls through an allowlisted proxy
- Async approval gates before high-impact write operations
- Session-isolated memory so context poisoning in one session doesn't persist into the next

And so on...

None of these are AI-specific controls, not really. They're least-privilege and separation-of-duty applied to a new surface.

So as a team building or adopting AI, if you can answer the blast radius question for every agent in production, you're doing yourself a big favor.

#cybersecurity #aisecurity #threatmodeling #ai

This drama unfolding with Delve is remarkable, yet totally believable.

Unfortunately there’s been so much emphasis placed on speeding through soc2 and other compliance requirements. 

The truth is, establishing compliant tech and doing config checks is easy. 

Getting the people and process legs of the stool takes time. 

It takes time because there’s tailoring to your culture and team. It requires alignment across leaders. It requires decisions about where to have friction in the name of security.

As an industry we’re so relentlessly focused on “tech-ifying” everything that we so quickly neglect the other elements of the job. 

For any companies that are dumping Delve or the GRC platforms, we’d love to talk to you about the work we’re doing at Sidekick Security. Our approach blends tech, people, and process with pre-built tools, skills, and workflows, but better than that, a relentless tailoring to your exact situation and goals.

You should be producing trust through your program. Not just dashboards. 

#ciso #delve #grc #aisecurity

Every vendor at RSA next week is going to tell you they deliver "outcomes, not tools."

They're right that the industry needed this correction. Buying 90 tools and hoping the Venn diagram of coverage eventually becomes a circle was never a winning strategy. But here's what I suspect is going to happen...the same companies that sold you shelf-ware or big heavy SaaS platforms for a decade are going to rebrand it as "outcome-driven" and change little except the slide deck. Tool vendors are still focused on their little slice of the ecosystem, their slice (however important that is) of the bigger problem domain that CISO's wrestle with.

Outcome-based security is a program design discipline, not a bucket of new features. And it requires several things that most haven't built or wouldn't want to IMHO:

1. A control baseline informed by your actual threat model (not a vendor's)
2. Metrics tied to business risk instead of vulnerability counts and other sort of vanity metrics
3. A feedback loop that changes how your team operates, not just what your dashboard shows
4. A roadmap that works to evolve your program such that the little slice of problem can hopefully be minimized (usually in direct conflict with growth goals for product vendors)

If your vendor is still overly emphasizing the outsized importance of their slice of the problem and isn't willing to talk about improvement measurements outside of their tools...you're getting a fancy AI-ified rebrand. 

#rsa #ciso #ai #cybersecurity

Drake meme joking about buying 47 best-in-class tools and hoping for integration versus buying 47 different outcomes and hoping all the platforms talk to each other

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