Chris Pierson unpacks what security teams actually pressed him on at Black Hat USA 2026, from how the AI works to why they want a relationship instead of a plug-in product. He also lays out why BlackCloak builds protection around the executive's whole trusted circle, and who inside the company he credits for two Inc. recognitions this year.
An attacker who wants to reach an executive often goes through the people around them. Family members, assistants, advisors, and caregivers all carry access and standing, and none of them sit inside the corporate directory. Dr. Chris Pierson, Founder and CEO of BlackCloak, describes digital executive protection as work that comes down to an individual and the circle around that individual.
What does BlackCloak actually protect? Corporate executives, boards, the C-suite, and their families, across privacy, personal cybersecurity, home network security, deepfake impersonation, and travel. Dr. Chris Pierson frames impersonation protection and deepfake protection as an answer to someone pretending to be a human being in order to swindle, defraud, or take advantage of a persona. The control point sits with the person rather than the message.
What did security teams want to talk about at Black Hat this year? Specifics. Dr. Chris Pierson says the excitement around AI and agentic AI arrived with a demand to dig in and actually talk about it. He recalls standing nearby while BlackCloak SVP of Product Matt Covington explained how the company uses engines, as opposed to the marketing language circulating elsewhere.
Two more patterns came through. People want a real relationship with the team behind a product rather than something they plug in and hook up, and Dr. Chris Pierson points to a community at Black Hat that he says has built up considerably over the past four years or so. People also want net new. Version nine of a familiar firewall is becoming a little less exciting, he says, and the sales engineers spent their time on the additive items instead.
BlackCloak appears on the 2026 Inc. 5000 for a second consecutive year, and earlier in 2026 it was named to Inc.'s Best Workplaces list in the Security Industry category, also for a second year. Dr. Chris Pierson credits the roughly 150 Cloakers based in the US, the company's own word for its team members, for both.
The data matters, the hardware matters, the platform matters, and at the end of it someone clicks, someone allows access, someone does something. That last step is where BlackCloak places its protection.
This is a Black Hat USA 2026 Recap. It is a post-event conversation revisiting the week on the ground, putting a spotlight on the guest and their company and pairing it with the editorial reach of ITSPmagazine. Learn more: https://www.studioc60.com/performance/#briefing
GUEST
Dr. Chris Pierson, Founder and CEO at BlackCloak
On LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/drchristopherpierson/
RESOURCES
Black Hat USA 2026 event coverage: https://www.itspmagazine.com/black-hat-usa-2026-cybersecurity-event-coverage-in-las-vegas
Learn more about BlackCloak: https://blackcloak.io
Impersonation Protection: https://blackcloak.io/impersonation-protection/
BlackCloak Extends Deepfake Protection to the Executive's Entire Trusted Circle: https://blackcloak.io/news-media/blackcloak-extends-deepfake-protection-to-the-executives-entire-trusted-circle/
BlackCloak Featured on the 2026 Inc. 5000 for Second Consecutive Year: https://blackcloak.io/news-media/blackcloak-featured-on-the-2026-inc-5000-for-second-consecutive-year/
BlackCloak Named to Inc.'s 2026 Best Workplaces List for Second Consecutive Year: https://www.prweb.com/releases/blackcloak-named-to-incs-2026-best-workplaces-list-for-second-consecutive-year-302788730.html
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KEYWORDS
Dr. Chris Pierson, BlackCloak, Sean Martin, Marco Ciappelli, recap, brand story, brand marketing, marketing podcast, Black Hat USA 2026, digital executive protection, impersonation protection, deepfake protection, circle of trust, executive threat intelligence, travel advisory, human attack surface, Inc. 5000, Cloakers
Executives Get Reached Through the People Around Them, and BlackCloak Protects That Whole Circle | A Black Hat USA 2026 Recap with Dr. Chris Pierson, Founder and CEO at BlackCloak | Hosted by Sean Martin and Marco Ciappelli
[00:00:09] Sean Martin: Marco, you trimmed your mustache.
[00:00:11] Marco Ciappelli: Sure. Yeah, I, I still have some glasses from last interview, but they're not the same.
[00:00:17] Sean Martin: Not the same. I,
[00:00:18] Marco Ciappelli: ho- I don't know if you can recognize me. Look at, look at you. I thought you were gonna be audio only
[00:00:23] Sean Martin: I have my, uh, my BlackCloak privacy sticker on
[00:00:27] Sean Martin: I didn't wanna be seen as we entered the room here.
[00:00:30] Marco Ciappelli: Ah, got it. Got it. Is that-- You know what I got here instead? I got BlackCloak.
[00:00:35] Sean Martin: you have
[00:00:35] Marco Ciappelli: I got the guy.
[00:00:37] Sean Martin: You
[00:00:37] Marco Ciappelli: got Chris. You got the sticker, I got the guy.
[00:00:40] Sean Martin: I got the privacy sticker,
[00:00:42] Marco Ciappelli: Founder, founder and CEO of a company that is really making something, making some waves, making some noise, growing, getting recognized, and we get to chat of all of these and more when we were at Black Hat 2026.
This is actually a little later, but, uh, it, it's still a recap. It still count as a five-minute, seven-minute. We'll see how long it goes. Chris and Sean, good to see you both
[00:01:09] Sean Martin: Yeah. Good to see you both.
[00:01:10] Dr. Chris Pierson: see you guys. Great to
[00:01:12] Sean Martin: We, we recovered from, uh, the week that is Hacker Summer Camp, and, uh, a lot of fun things happened there. We had, we had a lot of conversations. We'll get into some of that. But, uh, I don't know, Marco, kick it off
[00:01:24] Marco Ciappelli: Well, uh, I don't know if I recover yet because it, it didn't finish, it didn't f- it didn't finish yet. We're still recording. We're still producing. I just wrote an article a few days ago as a, as a recap. It's more of a story, so I, I invite people to s- to, to read it, but this is not about me. Although, I think that what I wrote can kind of lead into the conversation.
But first of all, Chris, uh, just a, a short introduction about who you are for people that don't know. Those few
[00:01:55] Dr. Chris Pierson: Yeah. No, that's great. And it's good to see you guys, uh, especially unscathed from, from Black Hat. So, uh, so no, I mean, it's, uh, good to talk to everyone. I'm, I'm Chris. I'm the CEO founder of BlackCloak. We're, uh, we're digital executive protection. We protect your corporate executives, board, C-suite, their families, and their personal lives from all sorts of privacy, cybersecurity, home network, deep fake impersonation, uh, even some travel stuff.
A lot of cool stuff coming out. But, uh, but yeah, we're there, we're there for you. We're there for your team. Ultimately, at the end of the day, we're there for that executive and their family members
[00:02:33] Sean Martin: You s- when you say you, you, you mean the Cloakers. That's a term that, that's a term I picked up, uh, that they,
[00:02:40] Dr. Chris Pierson: we do re, we do, we do refer to our team members, everyone as a Cloaker. Um,
[00:02:45] Sean Martin: you go
[00:02:46] Dr. Chris Pierson: uh,
[00:02:46] Marco Ciappelli: I can see, I can see a Marvel movie in there, The Cloakers. Hey, there's an idea. We can write the script.
[00:02:55] Sean Martin: Yeah
[00:02:56] Dr. Chris Pierson: by the time we, we're gonna get right on that. We're gonna get it out there. Every- everyone
[00:03:00] Sean Martin: it
[00:03:00] Dr. Chris Pierson: have a cape
[00:03:01] Marco Ciappelli: Yeah. Oh, I love that. I love capes. Well, listen, Chris, uh, um, we, we recorded on the floor, uh, at the booth. You had the booth there. A lo- lot of people passing by saying hi, and, and somebody even mentioned on one of the comment, I believe on, uh, on LinkedIn, that it was amazing to see the CEO and founder of the company spending so much time at the booth talking to everybody, and I, I have to agree with that.
I mean, you were on, and, and, and everybody loved to see you there. So, um-
[00:03:35] Dr. Chris Pierson: Yeah, I mean, look, there's a certain... Yeah, we have the suite, and our chief revenue officer was there, and I would pop back up and forth for some of the meetings in the suite, and we had a few other rooms and things that we were hosting. But I mean, look, when you talk about, when you talk about Black Hat and why you're there, you're there for the energy, you're there for the excitement, you're there for the pulse of what's happening on the floor.
You're there to talk to really, really cool engineers at other companies and talk to CISOs and heads of threat intelligence and all the rest. There are a few good people, I'm like, "Ah, just meet me down at the booth." Like, let's, let's go down there. Current clients, meet me at the booth. We'll go grab a, we'll grab water, grab some snacks, whatever, sit down and chat.
I mean, there is a certain amount of excitement that is there. And, you know, look, at the end of the day, you know, BlackCloak is about people. It's about real people. It's about that community. It's about the technology. It's about all those things fused together. And so our SVP of product was there, our chief revenue officer was there, our chief marketing officer was there. I was there. You know, the real folks that power and make and design and build BlackCloak. You know, we got about 150 of us that are all here, part of BlackCloak, domiciled in the US, and you wanna go meet them, you wanna go talk to them, you wanna have a relationship. That's what we want. And so, yeah, I wanna be in there on the floor a little bit
[00:04:54] Sean Martin: And you were there. A lot of the team was there for sure. We, we spent a lot of time with them, recorded a number of things. Uh, one of them was the, the, uh, overview or the, the, I'll say the celebration. At the time it was you knew, I knew, not everybody knew that you, uh, received another, recognition from Inc., uh, the Inc. 5000 award. second year in a row you received that, and,
[00:05:18] Dr. Chris Pierson: Yeah
[00:05:19] Sean Martin: cool. So we, we recorded that. But quick, quick note on what that is 'cause it, it really recognizes the Cloakers
[00:05:25] Dr. Chris Pierson: Yeah, so once again, Inc.'s 5000 fastest growing companies in the US. Uh, you know, it's just a-- It's amazing. It's, uh-- at our size, it becomes harder to do that, that whatever it was, was like 400 percent growth or so. But it becomes harder to do that year after year after year at our size. Um, I'm just massively... I mean, I'm massively proud. I'm humbled. I'm appreciative of what our team is doing each and every day. Um, obviously, right, humbled by that recognition from Inc. Um, we had another one earlier this year that I also love. It's, uh, right, Inc.'s 500 best workplaces to work. I mean, we've really, really, from the ground up, designed an amazing remote work culture here. And once again, those 150 or so folks that are in the US, uh, that are the Cloakers, I mean, they're the ones that receive all the rec-- should receive all the recognition. They're what pow-- is powering BlackCloak and the product and technology and our, our relationships with our clients. at the end of the day, they make that Inc. 5000 really achievable.
Um, but once again, it's great, great, phenomenal recognition.
[00:06:31] Marco Ciappelli: Yeah. Well, I think we're turning the five minutes in 10, and that's totally cool because I wanna, I want... I mean, people can dive in. All the, all the conversation are gonna be on the coverage page. We'll put the link, and they can learn more about all of this. But I wanna go back to the post Black Hat and all this conversation that you had with a coffee, with a drink, whatever it is, in the booth, in the room.
What was the-- I wanna hear from you the pulse of the conference, the tech and how it's changing people and, uh, whatever. You know, I like the word buzzword. That buzzword is my buzzword.
[00:07:09] Dr. Chris Pierson: Yeah, you know, I think, um, I think this year there was a lot of... Uh, obviously there's a lot of excitement about AI and agentic AI, but really this year was more of a, like, let's dig in, folks. Let's actually talk about it. I know when I was standing there, our, our, uh, SVP of product, uh, Matt Covington, he was talking about how we're utilizing engines and all the rest, like, as opposed to this marketing foo that's out there. I think people really wanted to understand, like, what are you doing? How are you doing it? How does this actually get us a step ahead? Right now, we're talking a lot about AI being used by attackers, and it is, and it's becoming harder to defend. Um, so I do think that people really wanted to get down to brass tacks on how exactly are you doing things there.
I think the second thing that was interesting is, at least in my conversations, um, people want a relationship. They don't wanna just buy a physical product and plug it in. They don't wanna buy a software product and, and hook it up. Um, what they want to do is they want to have a relationship, a real relationship with those folks.
I mean, the number of folks on our team that were account executives or enterprise relationship managers and all the rest are getting the hugs and getting the handshakes and all the rest, hosting a number of dinners and stuff, but they were coming up to people at the booth of, "Oh my God, so excited. I'll see you later tonight," all the rest. This means that at day one or even day minus 90, at day one of our relationship and at day 1,000 of our relationship, that it's really meaningful. Um, and once again, I go back to the power of the community. The power of the community is really, really strong there at Black Hat. It's gotten so much, just built up so much more over the past, uh, four or so, or four or so years. Um, and then, uh, uh, you know, I do think that what a lot of people are wanting to see is the next over the horizon, and what are the next things that you're doing that are net new, that are additive, uh, that aren't just commodity stuff, right? But are
[00:09:01] Marco Ciappelli: Mm-hmm.
[00:09:02] Dr. Chris Pierson: really groundbreaking. They wanna see innovation. Um, you know, the, the firewall version nine, I mean, at some point in time, uh, you know, this is, this is becoming a little less exciting. Um, they wanna see that innovation. They wanna know that people are going further and faster and really up to date with things. Um, and, uh, and, and that became really, really interesting.
I know our, our, our sales engineers really had a fun time talking to people about some of those net new, net new items, and especially the ones we were able to show privately in our suite. So that was really cool.
[00:09:34] Sean Martin: Yeah, and I'm gonna tie a few things together 'cause y- you mentioned relationship, so I know you're talking about your relationship with your customer, you talked about community, which is the in- the InfoSec community. your customers also have their own relationships their own communities, and I think the majority of technologies and products slung on the, uh, slung on the floor in the business hall are about enterprise, protecting systems, maybe protecting, uh, people's data, but not the people, not their family, not their communities necessarily, and that's really where y- you shine through. You have... We, we did a demo recording on the Circle of Trust. We did a demo recording on, uh, physical security, and those new releases really speak to the trust of an individual's community and their surroundings and, and all to protect them, which ultimately does protect the business, as we know from the many conversations we had.
But talk to me a little bit about... 'Cause those were two new things you, that you highlighted at the event, so maybe touch on those.
[00:10:41] Dr. Chris Pierson: I think, I mean, I, I love that, you know, our mission is we protect digital lives. That lives is, once again, it comes back to people, that human-centric approach, um, the hardening the human, the human attack surface. Like, this is all, right, who BlackCloak is. At the end of the day, it all comes down to an individual. so there were a lot of things there that we were able to showcase, the impersonation protection, deep fake protection, right? This is all about impersonating another human being and using it to swindle, to fraud, to scam, to take advantage of, right, that persona, so to speak. It all, all comes down to that human element. Um, in terms of some of the stuff that we showed in terms of travel advisory, once again, how are you and your family members going to remain safe when traveling to different destinations for work or for pleasure? It doesn't matter. But what is that kind of cloak of protection over you while you're traveling?
Once again, the people, people safety. Some of the other things that I know you were shown are coming up here soon in terms of the enhanced executive threat assessments and executive threat intelligence and how do we fuse that together. Once again, about the human. We have a number of different stories online that keep on popping up on, hey, as a result of actions of X, Y, and Z company, backlash to the CEO or backlash to the board for the drug price increase or backlash against...
But it all, all is coming back down to that human. so that's why the relationships are real. That's why we are focused on solving what we are. This is, uh, it's gotta be about the human. It's gotta be about the digital life, the digital lives of our clients. And so, um, I mean, I think you hit the nail on the head
[00:12:30] Marco Ciappelli: Mm. And the digital life, to go back to the, the, the bell that I ring all the time, is real. It's our life. It's hybrid world. We always end up with that. Um, then we will have to protect maybe our, um, our ag- agent twin that is gonna go around for us, and then we gotta go and protect that. But I mean, even to think that for years we've been thinking about we're protecting the machines, and that didn't mean we're protecting our stuff in it and the human.
It's, it's almost like a paradox 'cause that's why we... this industry exists, is to protect the human
[00:13:09] Dr. Chris Pierson: It's a hundred, it's 100%. We are just, right, we are really fused in there in the m- the, the individual machine topology. It is always about the human being. We always need to understand that, yes, the data matters, yes, the hardware matters, yes, the platform matters, but at the end of the day, the human element there is huge.
And there are a few companies that are out there that are, you know, seeing and triggering in more in that area that are... that have been for years, "Oh, we protect your computer, we protect your email, we protect your servers." And you see them scoping out further and further of, look, this is human-centric protection.
Any way you, you slice it, someone's clicking, someone's allowing access, someone's doing something there, and that just becomes really, really important. Really important
[00:13:58] Marco Ciappelli: Yep. Well,
[00:13:59] Sean Martin: So cool
[00:14:01] Marco Ciappelli: I think we did another briefing here, so
[00:14:03] Dr. Chris Pierson: I know. I was about to say,
[00:14:04] Marco Ciappelli: but it's so, but it's so cool. I mean, look, I always enjoy talking to you. Of course, it's all about the humanity, so when I see you and I'm next to you, uh, it's a, it's a different feeling. But, you know, it- we've done many remote, and it, it still count. It still count, right?
[00:14:22] Dr. Chris Pierson: I love it. It has to be. It has to be about that. Once again, it's gotta be about that relationship, the mind share, the intellectual. It's gotta be
[00:14:30] Sean Martin: Well, there's lots of, lots of cool stuff you and the team are working on, and congratulations on the awards, uh, successful event, all the new things you're releasing. Um, yeah, I'm gonna encourage everybody to watch all the other stuff we recorded with you, Chris, and the team, uh, the demos and, uh, connect with you online on LinkedIn and at BlackCloak.io.
Look at that. All right. Thanks everybody
[00:14:55] Dr. Chris Pierson: Thank you, guys