Soulful CXO Podcast

Set Yourself Up to Win | A Conversation with Mike Wilkes | The Soulful CXO Podcast with Dr. Rebecca Wynn

Episode Summary

Learn how to switch from feeling like an imposter to gaining confidence in your expertise.

Episode Notes

Guest: Mike Wilkes, Senior Security Advisor at Ammolite Analytx

On LinkedIn | https://www.linkedin.com/in/eclectiqus

Host: Dr. Rebecca Wynn

On ITSPmagazine  👉  https://www.itspmagazine.com/itspmagazine-podcast-radio-hosts/rebecca-wynn

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Episode Description

In this episode, we explore the intersection of technology and music and gain valuable insights into building a successful career in cybersecurity. Mike shares valuable insights on training employees to combat cybersecurity threats, the importance of trusting your instincts, and the role of AI in cybersecurity awareness. Don't miss this thought-provoking podcast episode!

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Resources

Stevens Institute of Technology - Cybersecurity Risk in Critical Infrastructure for Board Directors: https://www.stevens.edu/cybersecurity-risk-in-critical-infrastructure

NYU TICA (Threat Intelligence and Cybersecurity Analytics): https://em.online.engineering.nyu.edu/threat-intelligence

EEGAD: Eclectiq Executive Group Awareness Discussions: https://eegad.eclectiq.com/

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Episode Transcription

Dr. Rebecca Wynn: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Soulful CXO. I'm your host, Dr. Rebecca Wynn. We are pleased to have with us today, Mike Wilkes. Mike is a Chief Information Security Officer who has built, transformed, and protected companies such as SecurityScorecard, ASCAP, Marble, AQR Capital, ING Bank, Rabobank, CME Group, Sony and Macy's, as well as European banks and airlines.

He was nominated in 2020 to the World Economic Forum as a technology pioneer for providing thought leadership on cyber resilience in the oil and gas industry, and Quantum Security Working Groups. He's an author, an advisory board member, and a feature speaker at technology conferences such as Black Hat, Gartner, GovWare, and SANS.

He is a professor at NYU teaching cybersecurity courses. Additionally, he's an avid jazz fan [00:01:00] and musician serving on the Board of Trustees for the National Jazz Museum in Harlem. Mike, it's great seeing you again. Welcome to the show. 

Mike Wilkes: Thank you, Rebecca. And we share some love of music, as I understand, yes?

Dr. Rebecca Wynn: Yes, we do. I actively play trombone here in several groups in the valley, how about yourself? Where do you play? 

Mike Wilkes: I'm not currently gigging at the moment, but I did put together a house band when I was at ASCAP and just before COVID we had a lovely jam session.

In the lounge there, and it's great. There's a lot of talented musicians at ASCAP and we played some cover songs and I get to play the drums. And yeah it's, nice to, make music. I think trombone players are in a high demand, especially for big bands, right? You need lots of trombones.

Dr. Rebecca Wynn: And the other thing is, There's not too many females out there who are actually playing too. So especially like my Latin jazz band, I was the first female in it. That's Latin jazz, big band. We [00:02:00] play at The Nash and other big jazz clubs. And as soon as other women could see me, maybe it's like, well, she can do it. I can do it. It's, good to even remember, even in music groups, seeing someone who's more similar to you do it, that it actually gets you out of your shell and you can do it too. 

Mike Wilkes: Yeah, I mean, we don't have that problem in cyber security, right?

We're over 50 percent women in this field right now. Of course not. But jazz and infosec, I think that's a good theme to start with, because you need to be able to improvise, right?

We're not like classical musicians that go and, and try to be perfect and to execute what was written on the page flawlessly that is more cerebral and we're not like rock and roll and blues that are, you know, much more visceral musical forms and genres. And so I think that we're in jazz. I think we're a great combination of, you know, cerebral and visceral.

And I think that that's useful, an analogy and metaphor for, for InfoSec professionals, [00:03:00] uh, to be able to improvise and yet have some standards and some structure and say, okay, let's, uh, let's play, um, you know, uh, How High the Moon, right? And okay, what tempo and in what key and then we go, right? Um, wouldn't it be lovely if incident response could be that well coordinated?

Right? 

Dr. Rebecca Wynn: Yeah, I equate quite a bit. I tell people about playing trombone and actually going ahead and being a Chief Information Security Officer or CIO or CTO or in our position. Cause I tell people the one thing they're like, you play every night. And I said, yes, I do play every night. But the one thing is with the trombones, it's a long tuning slide.

So I really have no excuse ever to be out of tune. Not saying I'm not, but you think about I'm moving my slide front to back. I'm reading my music. Left to right, they're conducting right to left, and then I'm constantly having to adjust. It makes me get out of my head and into my heart. And one of the things we see a lot in the news and Soulful CXO is getting us out of our head and [00:04:00] more into our heart to be heart leading, heart thinking leaders that help us to be resilient. So it's amazing how people I find generally who are really good musicians, I like to have them, as you said, like on my incident response team and things along those lines, I think it allows you to be, be a little bit more flexible that, you know what, no matter whom you are, even though they appear to be perfect.

If you talk to them behind the scenes, they'll say, even that wasn't a perfect performance. And so that's the one thing too. I think we get a lot of pressure on us on trying to be perfect every single point in the day. And if you play music. Did I do the best I possibly could with the group and the acoustics and everything else that I could not control?

And did we end well together as a team? I think that's got a great lessons. . What do you think along those lines about building teams and seeing the music component, the musicians actually seemed to me be better incident response members, because you mentioned incident [00:05:00] response specifically. 

Mike Wilkes: Yeah. I've seen a lot of, and met a lot of InfoSec talent that are.

And, um, it's not hard to put together a house band when you work in a security company, cause there's going to be guitar players and drummers and bass players and keyboard players. And, uh, I think one of the phrases I like to borrow and mention for people that haven't heard it, I think it was just Dizzy Gillespie that said in jazz, there are no mistakes, only opportunities.

And I think that's a great worldview and life, you know, principle to live by, because if you feel like you wanted to do something, you know, experience is what you get when you were expecting something else, right? That's one of those other clever witticisms. Um, and so I think it's useful, this analogy to continue with it for a minute.

When I think about empathy. And I think about the difference between empathy and sympathy. Empathy is feeling for someone and sympathy is feeling with someone. And so people can't be sympathetic with a CISO unless they've been a CISO. They can be empathetic [00:06:00] and they can say, Oh, you must have had a really hard time with that breach, you know, and losing your team and having all that money and damage to the reputation.

But some of these things, you know, make you stronger. And, uh, so for the. The idea of empathy though, I've talked about having digital empathy and as a CISO and as a security professional, I don't want to punish people with phishing tests, right? I'm not trying to trick them. I'm trying to train them. I'm trying to help them detect.

And so I always leave. What I call breadcrumbs in my phishing tests. So a typo, you know, some grammatical error, you know, some type of thing that should flag them and make them think suspicious or be suspicious or skeptical at least. And I usually leave like two or three of them. And so everyone's like kind of gamified now when I have this, you know, they're like, well, what were the breadcrumbs this time?

Right. I only saw two. What was the third one? Right. I was like, Oh, we use the letter I instead of the number one or vice versa, or the letter L or something. And so it's like, really. It's a very detail oriented, kind of [00:07:00] obsessive compulsive, um, kind of, uh, piecing. But, I think it raises people's, uh, attention.

Um, and we can never expect people to be perfect, though. And that's where this idea of digital empathy is. Let's plan for people to click on emails. Let's plan for people to be the weakest link. Let's never try. To expect machine like perfection, right? Like a classical music computer that is not humanity.

Humanity will always have foibles and flaws. And that's one of the things that I think the AIs will be jealous of in the future when they become our overlords. Right? They'll be like, how do you? Make mistakes. How do you improvise? How do you, you know, um, get inspired as to what a fork should look like, right?

I think there's elements of design, uh, that are very aesthetic and very much tied to the zeitgeist of the time and the people and I don't know that a really good word token predict prediction engine like MLMs is going to be able to do that, right? [00:08:00] It can just say, well, historically speaking, forks look like this, right?

And threaks look like this, right? And so forks are like that. And so I think that's a fun way to look at life, is to allow yourself the freedom to be human. Uh, the freedom to make mistakes, uh, to design an architect for that to happen, and yet still try to build trustworthy, robust, you know, fault tolerant systems.

Dr. Rebecca Wynn: I like how you, mentioned the philosopher Nietzsche, as well as Kelly Clarkson, "what doesn't kill you make you stronger," which I, totally, agree with. And I love that anthem. You brought up cybersecurity awareness training. And I think one of the things that's really coming to the forefront with the evolution of AI.

AI has been around since 1950, ML has been around since 1960, but now it being able to learn what we don't go ahead and respond to how to write more like the CEO or like you, you do a lot of writing. I do a lot of writing. How can I [00:09:00] go ahead and impersonate Rebecca or Mike or CEO or something like that better?

So when you get those emails, you go ahead and you're going to click on them. How do you suggest that people go about start training their people to, do that better? My thing is, trust your gut. There's always going to be a gut check even though it sounds like Rebecca, you know what?

I'm going to go ahead and whether it's another chat program that we have, or it's the text or telephone call. Rebecca, did you really just send me this? It sounds like you, but I have never gotten an email from you along these lines. How are you guys training that? Or how do you suggest people train that?

It's not in the gamification right now. It's not in those programs. So I think it's critical to go ahead and make sure that people are aware of that. 

Mike Wilkes: Yeah, I think the biggest mitigation to deep and successful fakes is process. And so if someone is saying, Hey, I need you to wire 10 million to the [00:10:00] Cayman Islands.

And they have my voice because I've recorded lectures and they're on YouTube. So process is your defense.

Meaning you need to make that, like you mentioned, an out of band confirmation. So if you get an email from someone, Well, don't email them back and say, was this you? Because if it was, you know, an account that's been taken over, of course the bad actor is going to write back and say, yes, it was me. And of course, don't hit them up on Slack or Teams, uh, either.

Because that's probably a compromise channel as well. All right, so you're going to need to make a phone call or a text message and, you know, a lot of the CEO impersonation scams are appealing to authority, you know, our desire to please, you know, authority figures. So you're honored that the CEO is asking you to go buy a whole bunch of Google Play Store cards, scratch off the back, send the photo to them so you can hand them out at a meeting or she can hand them out at a meeting.

Um, so we have to desensitize people to those call to action because that's going to be the suspicious element. All the other things are going to be perfect. The [00:11:00] voice, you know, the text, you know, um, even the email address and the phone number can be spoofed, you know. So really, you just have to think, is this a normal ask?

And if it's not a normal ask, then... How can I get some confidence, you know, that this call to action is actually an urgent, you know, um, uh, situation and I think that, uh, like the bad guys, bad girls as well, let's be equal opportunity here. Um, they are going to be utilizing this just like I've been reading about DarkBERT and DarkBART.

Uh, which is basically, you take all the data on the dark web and you train an LLM. So now they have an even more efficient dark web librarian that can help them figure out who to go for, what password they probably used, because, you know, we have all these, um, breaches for third parties. So if you use a password that's similar to those passwords, uh, the main mitigation, as you know, is, is use a password manager and have really long, strong, unique passwords. Uh, apparently GPTs and, [00:12:00] and LLMs have been used to augment the brute force techniques.

Uh, so now, you gotta go at least 15 characters, uh, on your password. 

Dr. Rebecca Wynn: Yeah, I totally agree with you on that. And the other thing is just because we mentioned about having that other channel, the one thing that I always tell people, you cannot beat the people up who go ahead and they go through the channel and say, is this really you?

Is this something that we're really doing as a company? I get tired of hearing, I brought it to their attention and then, I got reamed because I questioned. I reward people for questioning there's their intent is to protect the company and protect your data at large and your money at large. So take that as a sign that they really care.

Don't beat them up. I rather have people bring me a thousand of them that all of them are legit than them question.

They don't bring one because that's when you see breaches happen. I got beat up so many times or someone else got beat up [00:13:00] sometimes that it didn't seem right, but I was fearful that if I questioned. 

Mike Wilkes: Yeah, no, I definitely like to have a policy of no surprises. And so I want people to come forward and I love it when they do.

And if you deploy like a phish report button, um, so that you can actually have that sort of collective awareness of the 1st event that's opened and someone sends something that right here, you can then, of course, protect hundreds of other colleagues from that same failure. And so I think you need to.

Yeah. I think a good phishing program, um, is going to be happening, you know, monthly, or if not more often, and to be tailored to different departments and scenarios. One of my favorite call to action for the legal team is, you know, click here because you've been served a subpoena, right? And so they're just like trained to like, oh my God, oh my God.

And so that's always going to be, um, a challenge, I guess, is to figure out how to come up with not one to [00:14:00] many. But, you know, sort of targeted in group and almost one to one, uh, education programs based on your previous performance of clicking, opening, downloading, 

and so, um, humans will always be human. Let's make sure that we acknowledge that, embrace it. And, uh, that's one of the themes that I picked up from someone, if you're familiar, Kelly Shortridge. Uh, she wrote a book. Yeah. Um, Chaos Security Engineering with, uh, Aaron Reinhardt and Kelly's a really great thinky thinker and part of the Tinkerers tribe.

Change the narrative, right? And to flip, um, what we're looking at, you know, that drawing of a duck that looks like a rabbit. It's like a gestalt shift kind of drawing.

So I often think that that's a good way to affect change because you don't have to argue with people about, or you shouldn't argue about the facts, right? Which would be the ink dots on the page. But what you could argue about is what you see, and you can't see it as a duck If you see it as a rabbit and you can't see it as both at the same time, unless you're really good at like, fuzzing out [00:15:00] your, 

Dr. Rebecca Wynn: I flip back and forth all the time on every one of them.

Mike Wilkes: But I think it's useful to be able to flip the narrative. And so you're not teaching anyone anything. You're not putting like the pigeon holes in the roll top desk, you know, little bits of information in someone's brain. 'cause that's not how we work and think. You just need to give them a new perspective.

Right? And that's when you can affect real good, uh, really, you know, impactful change. And you were talking about philosophers. I would be remiss if I did not pull up my favorite philosophy quote, which is Heraclitus, an ancient Greek philosopher and historian, who said that you can never step into the same river twice.

And I think it's a great analogy for the river of risk. It changes every minute. It has a different color, a different sound, a different flow rate. And so we really can't think of risk as just an annual questionnaire that you send off to your third parties once a year saying, Hey, , have you been breached in the last 12 months?

And like, yeah, we were breached back in January. Didn't you read about it? It's a big deal. SMS fatigue or one of their outsourced fourth party providers, uh, that had been compromised, right?

Some [00:16:00] people want to strap on a helmet and head right for that digital river of risk and embrace it and go through the class five rapids and then get out on the other side, right?

And transform themselves to a cloud based, you know, cloud native stack, right? That's modern and other people just want to sit back on a. Uh, inner tube with a six pack of beer and just lazily floating along the oxbow of life, you know, just taking it easy. And you need to know what kind of company you're in and you need to know what kind of person you are.

And if you have those lined, um, then you can be happy. 

Dr. Rebecca Wynn: That really goes along with today. Where a lot of people are leaving current CISO roles, determining if they're actually going to go into another CISO role. And, I think part of that is not being in tune with your flow and what type of companies are more towards what I call your authentic self. I've done it myself too, where I've gone to a company, I've gone through all the interviews and then found out very quickly that culture is not a culture that allows me to be my best [00:17:00] self.

How, do you usually recommend people weed through all of that? And when you, once you get there to become a strong leader, because the other part of that is knowing what kind of leader that you innately are. You know, what kind of presence do you have? What resonates with you? 

Mike Wilkes: Well, I think that there's usually not just a monoculture and so you can usually find in a reasonably large organization, you can usually find your tribe, so to speak, and I'm always hired into a company as a disruptor.

So that's part of my job description. I'm here to put on the big pants and say, okay, we're going to get a SOC two certification and we're going to prove to people that we care about security. Uh, and then one up that SOC two type two, right? We don't just do it once we do it every day correctly. Right. And then one up that FedRAMP moderate , and it takes a while to get listed and to be FedRAMP ready. And then you need your agency sponsor. That's just a way of me saying that there's different cultures and you can [00:18:00] find a group that can sustain you with intrinsically rewarding interactions and experience.

It doesn't matter necessarily what the values are written on the wall in the lobby. Enron had lovely values written on the wall of their lobby, right? They didn't live by them. But if you do find yourself in an organization that is. antithetical to your very being and worldview, then, yeah, that's not a healthy environment for you.

You're not going to be successful there. Um, but if you do want to be a part of transformation, mindset is a lot harder to change than tool set. So you can come in and say, okay, let's get rid of this endpoint tool. Let's make sure we use this, you know, as our firewall. But at the end of the day, all tools can be misconfigured .

They can all be done poorly and they can all be done well. So I like to be fairly agnostic about tool set, but about mindset, I definitely want to be a part of the tribe that is trying to make real change and not just check the box, compliance. Uh, we've heard about [00:19:00] this derogatory concept, right? Firewall.

Yes. We have a firewall. Check the box. Um, does the firewall have an any...any rule on it? Right? Well, I don't care. I'm a compliance person. I just care that you have a firewall . Yep. As opposed to something that's actually just a sieve or a switch if it doesn't have, you know, actual rules to block bad traffic and, and access patterns.

Uh, so I think that for me, I've been in small startups, and I've worked in large organizations, and it's not the same fish swimming in the same pond when I worked at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, I was in the enterprise server platform, and I was responsible for 10,000 servers and a quadrillion dollars in contracts traded, and I used to have to work with the security team.

And the security team was like a five headed Hydra and none of the heads trusted each other and they were all fighting in between themselves. You had Endpoint and Firewall and, you know, all sorts of different groups. And I earned the nickname the GIS Whisperer. And so [00:20:00] I was able to sort of calm, you know, this, uh, this, uh, ferocious beast.

And I took some stuff off their plate. Um, that's one of the things that's useful. If you're in an organization, large or small, find something that's unloved and unattended for and make it your own, because then eventually you'll be promoted or given ownership of it formally. But a lot of times there's stuff that's left behind by people that left, you know, and it's really kind of critical and important that no one knows it and you can learn this over time. And so I like to think that I collect things and the other, uh, uh, function I guess I had was to decommission things, right? Because everyone loves to build, no one loves to destroy. And so remember there's a whole life cycle to systems development and software development and there needs to be a death.

And so I always like to, as a trick, you know, a little, um, uh, way of celebrating decommissions, I'll create a wiki page. And I will put the decon dates and make like a technology graveyard and just say, Hey, we got rid of novell network or Hey, we got rid [00:21:00] of, you know, windows 2008. And you celebrate those things just as much as you do.

Oh, we just got this cool new shiny tool that, you know, everyone wants. It's super distracting. 

Dr. Rebecca Wynn: You've been in quite a few positions . Was there a point in time when, you're like, I got this, I know this, I'm comfortable here. And I'm where I I'm in the field in an area of expertise that I belong. Did you find one day or one moment that you like that switch from imposter to, I got this?

We do that music. There's a point where you practice all the time and you're like, I got this and I can feel it. I can feel the rhythm. I can feel it internally. It's part of my soul and I can, breathe it. 

Mike Wilkes: Yeah. You're, you're present. You're intellectually and, you know, emotionally present in what you're doing.

And I think in terms of like imposter syndrome, I'm a white male, I'm the apex predator according to this whole imposter syndrome narrative, right? So I should never have imposter syndrome because everyone's trying to be me and wants to And [00:22:00] I'm like, no, it's totally bogus. Yeah. Everyone, including white males, have this issue of imposter syndrome at various times for various elements of, of things that they care about.

And so one of the first times I was leaving the think tank, uh, working in San Francisco for the Department of Education. And I realized there was nothing I could do to make education better at the federal or state level. Had to be all grassroots, local, teachers, parents, community, bottom up. And so I left.

Um, technically, I guess you could say I was fired, but, um, that was a long time ago. And I walked up and my hobby became my career. I walked up to a job interview and they said, you have to know Perl. You have to know how to write perl code, uh, to do this job. And I was like, yep, I can write Perl. And of course I knew no Perl, right?

So it's the whole fake it before you make it. But of course they have to train you. They have to introduce you. And so there was this lovely contractor . His name was Dimitri who was doing Yahoo's log file analysis. So I was working for a company called Internet Profiles [00:23:00] and we were paid to provide third party independent, um, uh, analytics of how many times banner ads displayed. So Honda cars, Weber grills on yahoo. com. Yahoo is getting like 20 million hits a day back in that early, early era. And Dimitri taught me Perl and he taught me really well. I learned how to do like inline Perl expressions with reg X's and ox and grips and equivalents.

And, and I develop Perl chops, right? And so eventually, um, I kind of kicked myself for not learning any programming language prior to that point in time, because what I've realized many years later to be a good systems administrator and to be a good info sec analyst and to be a good data scientist, you need to have to have some kind of automation.

And some kind of, you know, um, proclivity for at least a language, whether that be Python or Perl or OCaml or Haskell or something, right? What [00:24:00] are the cool kids programming in these days? But, um, that's certainly not Java, right? Um, but the, the, the idea is that you want to use these tools for other purposes.

And so for me... One of the things that I always struggled with is that I studied philosophy in college and people are like, why should I hire you? You know, I want somebody to study computer science. And I'm like, no, man, that's crazy. That's like a sculptor studying chisels. No, a sculptor makes works of art.

The chisels are just tools that you use. And computers, for me, are just tools that we use to do something else in this life, in this world, right? So we create an experience, we create a financial transaction. And there's all sorts of... Other things, you know, you don't study the ding on zick, you know, as they say in German, um, you don't study the thing unto itself, or at least you shouldn't, some people can, but the rest of us should have, you know, useful ways of abusing computers for a living.

If you don't know three ways of abusing a tool, you don't [00:25:00] know how to use it. And so I like to think of myself as a computer abuser. 

Dr. Rebecca Wynn: How did you get your resilience in the field that can be so tough, especially being in it for the number of years you have? Because every year it's different and our, knocks are different every year.

Mike Wilkes: Well, that's a good question. I think I like to think of resilience, um, in the non engineering metallurgical sense. If you think about a Volkswagen Beetle and someone crashes or bumps into and dents the fender, resilience in that case is just hammering back out the dents and making it look like it did prior to getting dented. And so you think about things like tensile strength and ductile properties of metal, right?

That's the mechanical engineering worldview of resilience. And a definition of resilience in that old school way would be the ability of an object to return to its former shape after being exposed to extreme forces, right? Like a can of [00:26:00] Coke and then make it whole again. But for me, I'd much rather focus on the psychological and ecological definition of resilience, which is to adapt and be transformed by that experience. You don't want to go back to the way you were prior. You can't, you know, you want to become better. And so I think of Nicholas Taleb's, um, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder and the idea that bones get stronger when we subject them to force.

They get atrophied if they're not, and so I think we need to build systems from that definition of resilience. My own resilience, um, is music and teaching, uh, teaching gives me energy. You know, I teach at NYU, I teach, I've taught HackerU, ThriveDX courses to hundreds of students, and I love helping people find that spark.

What is that thing that is really just... You know, interesting for them, intrinsically interesting, not extrinsic. You're not just doing it for the money. If you do it for the money, you'll burn out fast. Even if you get tons of money, it's just not a [00:27:00] sustainable level of play. And here I refer to Finite and Infinite Games, a book I read in college, which is actually a fairly religious book, but the idea in my mind is that there is no finish line to security. You're not like, oh, today we're secure. And then you're done. It's like the game of catch. The game of catch is infinite. You practice the game, you play the game, in order to get good at it and have fun.

And so if you want to approach InfoSec as an infinite game, then you've already gotten rid of some of the baggage about, like, are we secure, are we not secure? That's a very, you know, subjective question. And so I think it's useful for us to approach. The career in our path as ways of tuning in sometimes, and then tuning out, maybe you need to take a sabbatical and go walk about for a year in Southeast Asia or something, or you just want to go meditate in the Pacific Northwest and recoup and regenerate.

I don't think we pay enough attention to the wellness elements. Of how to be balanced. And so there's a lot [00:28:00] of unhealthy coping strategies that emerge, um, you know, drugs, uh, weight gain, uh, loss of sleep, um, you know, alcoholism, all sorts of challenges. And if we don't talk about them, then we're doing ourselves a disservice.

We really do need to find sustainable, healthy ways to survive this stress and to become stronger and better because of it. 

Dr. Rebecca Wynn: Unfortunately, our time has totally flown by. What is the best way for people to reach out to you for advisory services, learn more about your courses and to reach out to you for speaking engagements?

Mike Wilkes: Yeah, I'm available. I have a LinkedIn page, uh, and it's, uh, my handle is eclecticus, uh, E C L E C T I Q U S. And if I were to ever have a comic book, my character would be Professor Eclecticus, right? And I'd be like a Hogwarts robed professor that, you know, has superpowers of the intellect or something. So, that's, that's my, um, my favorite self image there.

Um, but, uh, yeah, happy to reach out, um, and, uh, I teach [00:29:00] at NYU. I'll be starting to teach a course at Columbia in the spring. And, uh, that's usually one course per year. Uh, and then I have an online course at NYU included on threat intelligence and cyber community. Cybersecurity Analytics called TICA, which is part of their nine month CISO and CIO program, and it's offered as a standalone.

So I love it when the students reach out to me and connect. So if you've ever been my student and haven't connected, make sure you do connect. I can always introduce you when you're looking for work or looking for new ideas. And if you don't know me and you thought that you might like to listen to me, I have some of my courses that I published on YouTube for that I don't teach anymore.

So you can get Professor Eclecticus for free. 

Dr. Rebecca Wynn: Mike, that's great. Thank you so much for being on the show. You are a soulful CXO. 

Mike Wilkes: Well, thank you very much, Dr. Rebecca, and it was my pleasure to speak with you today. Thanks for those great questions.