At RSAC Conference 2026, Dr. Chris Pierson of BlackCloak joined Sean Martin and Marco Ciappelli to talk about what it really takes to protect the people that attackers target most -- corporate executives, board members, and their families -- in the one place enterprise security cannot reach: their personal digital lives. From a new travel advisory platform to deepfake impersonation defense, this conversation makes the case that trust is not just a value at BlackCloak -- it is the product.
At RSAC Conference 2026, Dr. Chris Pierson, Founder and CEO of BlackCloak, sat down with Sean Martin and Marco Ciappelli for a conversation that has become something of an annual tradition. What started in 2018 as a category BlackCloak largely invented -- digital executive protection -- has become one of the most pressing concerns in enterprise security. Adversaries have figured out that the easiest path into a company often runs straight through the personal lives of its leaders: the About Us page, the board listing, the family members visible on social media. BlackCloak was built to close that gap.
BlackCloak announced at RSAC Conference 2026 the launch of its new travel advisory platform -- a tool designed to give executives and their families actionable, real-time intelligence when traveling domestically or internationally. Pierson explained that CISOs and CSOs are increasingly being asked questions that go well beyond network security: what are the crime trends in this city, what embassy contacts are needed, which areas should be avoided? The platform distills complex, fast-moving threat intelligence into concise briefings -- four or five pages, mobile-accessible, and built for the executive and the family members traveling alongside them.
On the privacy side, BlackCloak introduced Search Suppression -- a new feature that goes further than data broker removal alone. Even after information is scrubbed from the major data broker sites, traces of personally identifiable information can persist across the open internet. Search Suppression identifies those instances and requests their removal from search engine results, shrinking the digital footprint that attackers use to build targeted OSINT profiles. And because the threat surface shifts as executives' children age and begin generating their own data trails, the platform monitors continuously -- not just at a single point in time.
Pierson also addressed the deepfake threat head-on. BlackCloak re-released its Impersonation Protection feature with deeper capabilities specifically designed for this problem. Plugin-based detection tools for Teams or Zoom leave the most common attack vectors -- phone calls, text messages, WhatsApp, Signal -- completely unaddressed. Impersonation Protection allows members to push a quick identity-verification request through the BlackCloak app to anyone in their trusted circle, regardless of how the original communication arrived. If verification fails, alarm notifications fire to both the CISO and the BlackCloak team. In a world where high-quality deepfake audio and video can be synthesized from publicly available earnings call recordings and media appearances, slowing down to verify through a trusted channel is one of the most reliable defenses available.
The conversation closed on the concept of trust -- a word Pierson returned to repeatedly. It is, he said, the reason people choose BlackCloak. The relationships the company builds with CISOs, CSOs, and the executives and families they protect require trust that is built carefully and maintained continuously. As BlackCloak scales, preserving that culture is something Pierson thinks about deeply. For a company whose entire business is built on protecting people in their most personal digital spaces, trust is not just a value. It is the product.
This is a Brand Spotlight. A Brand Spotlight is a ~15 minute conversation designed to explore the guest, their company, and what makes their approach unique. Learn more: https://www.studioc60.com/creation#spotlight
GUEST
Dr. Chris Pierson, Founder and CEO, BlackCloak
https://www.linkedin.com/in/drchristopherpierson/
RESOURCES
BlackCloak official website: https://blackcloak.io
BlackCloak Digital Executive Protection Platform: https://blackcloak.io/product/
Request a BlackCloak demo: https://blackcloak.io/executives/
Are you interested in telling your story?
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KEYWORDS
Dr. Chris Pierson, BlackCloak, Sean Martin, Marco Ciappelli, brand story, brand marketing, marketing podcast, brand spotlight, digital executive protection, executive cybersecurity, personal cybersecurity, deepfake defense, impersonation protection, travel advisory security, search suppression, data broker removal, OSINT, executive privacy, RSAC Conference 2026, RSAC 2026, cybersecurity, privacy
When Trust Becomes the Product: Digital Executive Protection in a World of Deepfakes and Disappearing Privacy | A Brand Spotlight at RSAC Conference 2026 with Dr. Chris Pierson, Founder and CEO of BlackCloak
[00:00:10] Sean Martin: Let's start. Okay, we start now. Ready? Three. Ready? Two, one. Go. Go. Where are you going?
Marco Ciappelli: I'm not, I just arrived. You just arrived here. Do you wanna go somewhere?
Sean Martin: You know, you wanna travel. I like to travel, but we'll get there. Deep fake AI travel. I just traveled, I just came here -- RSAC Conference 2026 -- and look what we found.
Marco Ciappelli: I know, I know. Chris cruising around out on the street. We said, Chris, come on. We have this nice suite up here for you.
Dr. Chris Pierson: I love it. I'm always happy to do that. I think it's the other way around. It's always nice to see you -- you always have a great suite -- and yeah. You're always a gracious host. And it's always good to see you, Chris.
Sean Martin: It is always good to see both of you. Very, very good.
Marco Ciappelli: Yeah. It's become a tradition. Yes. Almost every RSAC Conference. That's where we met.
Sean Martin: I always like to remember when we met the first time, many years ago. We're not counting -- many, many years ago. We're not counting, but here we are -- many hats, many adventures, and many success stories that you're having with BlackCloak.
[00:01:10] Dr. Chris Pierson: Yeah, we're excited. We're excited. How's it going? It's going great. The company is continuing to fight the good fight, growing -- the problems, as you know, are expanding, continuing to expand. This year is especially fun. It's just kicked off with a big, big head start. So we're really excited about that. And then I'm personally just thrilled that this week is RSAC Conference because it's a community, right?
Marco Ciappelli: It is absolutely. The community and being here, being able to be part of the community, see everyone, have some real conversations -- whether it's running across the street to a bar, on a show floor, or in the hotels -- that's just what it's all about. It's fun.
Dr. Chris Pierson: Nobody wants to come, but everybody's excited to come. Everyone is excited once they're here. They're like, oh, look, I just ran into this person and -- hug and selfie. You know. Yeah. It's not easy in San Francisco, but once people are here, they remember the reason why they decided to come.
Sean Martin: Yeah. It's all about the people.
[00:02:10] Marco Ciappelli: It's all about the people. You're actually connected to the people much more than many of the other offerings out on the floor at RSAC Conference. Yeah. Digital executive protection -- helping the executives be protected from all the bad stuff. So what's the latest there, Chris?
Dr. Chris Pierson: It is great. It's a wonderful area to be in. As you know, digital executive protection is the category that we created back in 2018. It just continues to grow. Companies of all sizes are being targeted and they're going the same way, right? They're going to the About Us leadership page. They're looking at who are the people in the news, who do they want to reach out and touch? And they're going to that About Us page, the leadership page. They're looking at the board, they're looking at the corporate executives in the C-suite, the executive leadership team.
[00:03:10] Dr. Chris Pierson: And they are saying, how can we go ahead and interfere with them? How can we interfere with the company? How can we affect their lives? It might be monetary, financial gain, it might be reputational. What can we do to effectuate some type of harm to that organization? And as defenders, as people that are really trying to mitigate that and shrink that attack surface, it's hugely exciting. Very, very rewarding -- probably the most rewarding thing I've ever done in my life. And I know our team really, really focuses on that mission as well. So we protect digital lives -- and that's a mouthful. It's 360. You look around and I know you're at that point where -- you know me -- I always talk about this hybrid society where we're online, but we're also in an analog world.
Marco Ciappelli: Mm-hmm. And you're actually connecting some of the services that are right there at the intersection of the digital and the physical world, and we were joking about traveling, so there was a reason.
[00:04:10] Dr. Chris Pierson: Yeah, no, I mean, as we saw with the tragic murder of Brian Thompson, there's this convergence that occurred. It's been occurring for a number of years, but it really was out there in the limelight in December of 2024. And even more so with executive travel, with travel of folks around the world. This has become something that our clients have been asking a lot more about. BlackCloak announced, earlier today, that its travel advisory platform is coming out. We have a number of different companies that are testing it, and so we're partnering with CISOs and CSOs who, yes, have the cybersecurity and privacy remit within their scope, but more so they're being asked: hey, I'm headed to the Winter Olympics -- what type of cybersecurity precautions do I need to take? And oh, by the way, what are the different alerts I should be aware of? What are the things I need to know in terms of the embassies? What about local crime? And more and more, those CISOs and CSOs have been turning to BlackCloak.
[00:05:10] Dr. Chris Pierson: And so we have really productized -- uniquely built by us, for us, for our clients -- focused on those executives -- the travel advisory service or feature that we have, and we are pushing it out to market. We're really excited about it. It's very cool. And the cool thing is that it's something that everyone can easily understand, right? It's not just the executive, but the family members traveling with him or her can also understand it. And we're just really excited about that.
Sean Martin: So what's the action there? I mean, you get the intelligence. And then do you just say, well, you can or you cannot go, it's not advisable? Or do you actually give tips and help how to make that trip more secure?
[00:06:10] Dr. Chris Pierson: It's a great question. What it really comes down to is interpreting all those signals we're getting -- both things that are public in terms of State Department sites, other travel alerts, advisories -- and distilling that into something that is very, very easily digestible by the executive, really by their partner as well, the CSO, the CISO, but by the executive and their family. That has action items: here's where the embassy is, here are the numbers, here are areas to stay away from. All of those different threats, especially when they change -- that's critically, critically important to what we are doing here at BlackCloak. So it has to be grounded in real data with information sources that are out there. But it has to be something that is quick, right? It can't be these 50-page productions that nobody is going to read and digest. It has to be something where it's four or five pages, easily digestible, and they can actually bring it with them.
Dr. Chris Pierson: The other thing is that it has to be something that's mobile. So somebody might be in Italy, but all of a sudden they want to do a quick jaunt over to Spain. Well, what's going on there?
[00:07:10] Dr. Chris Pierson: They have to be able to reach over to their BlackCloak app, go ahead and click on the travel advisory section, put in Spain, see what's happening, determine what they want to do, how they want to do it. Now they're empowered to make better decisions. They're able to see what those risks are, and we also have some interesting dashboard monitoring that will be coming soon as well into that platform. So the system and the CSO can also see and monitor that. It's a one plus one equals three here with BlackCloak in terms of what we can provide holistically.
Sean Martin: Love it. So what are some of the things that you might find in the advisory? I'm going to an F1 race in Miami. In May. Yeah, exactly. What might you see in there?
[00:08:10] Dr. Chris Pierson: You'll see different things about crime trends that are happening. Maybe it's just pickpocketing, maybe it's luring travelers into having drinks that may have been opened or had some things in them. It might be parts of the city that are areas you should stay away from. So you'll see that information. Right now we're actually working with a lot of companies that have folks who actually have to travel to the Middle East, or where they may have flights that might have to be diverted in that area. Understanding at a moment's notice what those risks may or might be, and being able to provide that live, actionable data intelligence. A lot of threats have actually changed in that area of the world, and in South America as well, as a result of different actions. So we have to be able to respond and react to those. We're able to do so from a country level and from a city and region level -- really, really dial in.
Dr. Chris Pierson: The other nice feature is that for some of our larger clients, they want the threat intelligence as a part of that. And so we're able to actually have that one-to-one helper, that one-to-one concierge, be able to explain things and have different threat briefings based on what they need. This goes beyond 'bring a burner phone, bring a burner laptop' -- real actionable items for folks.
[00:09:10] Marco Ciappelli: Yeah. So this is about preventing things from happening as much as you can. Absolutely. Then there is the moment where you realize that things have happened. You are all over the internet. I'm switching gears here.
Dr. Chris Pierson: Yeah, I mean, in terms of your digital footprint, these digital breadcrumbs -- the amount of information that gets out there just continues to increase every single day. The amount of breadcrumbs we're leaving behind -- that trail -- is really, really important to cybercriminals, to other nation states. And so we've all done a great job in terms of data broker removal, removing things from the411.com, the Spokeo, the ZabaSearch, all those different data brokers that are out there -- legal, legitimate businesses -- but they suck up your information and then make it publicly available.
[00:10:10] Dr. Chris Pierson: That's just simply not good enough anymore. And so BlackCloak has been working for quite some time on a unique product, a unique feature to our privacy swath of tools, called Search Suppression. What it does is it actually looks for individual instances of your personally identifiable information that may just be on the internet. And what we'll do is we'll go ahead and ask for those links to be suppressed from the different search engines so they are not able to be found by anybody looking out there for you. It's just another layer of protection that BlackCloak offers its members, and of course their families.
Dr. Chris Pierson: The cool thing about this is it's a moving target. So the executive may be safe and secure and have a really shrunken privacy footprint at time one. But then what about the kids? As they turn 16, 17, 18 -- are they putting out more information? Are they talking more? Are they adding to that digital exhaust? And what can we do to find and remediate that information?
[00:11:10] Dr. Chris Pierson: It's absolutely a game of whack-a-mole. But one that we're really happy to play here at BlackCloak to make sure that we're protecting our clients' digital lives. And sometimes we joke -- once it's out there on the internet -- you know, it's like how are you gonna put the toothpaste back in the tube when it's out? But there is a way to do it, or at least to mitigate it. Look, once it's out there, it's out there -- you're never pulling it back. Yes, that is true in some sense. But with regard to certain types of information, there are ways to suppress that and make it much harder to find. Don't make it easy for them -- and really it's about making it harder for the attacker.
Dr. Chris Pierson: So you've parked your car at Chicago O'Hare Airport. There are a hundred cars there, and 99 of them have the blinky red light, the windows up, nothing on the seat, and the doors are locked. And then there's that one car where there are extra twenties on the seat, the laptop's on the seat, the window might've been cracked, and you can't see a blinky light.
[00:12:10] Dr. Chris Pierson: Well, technically every car can be broken into. But you know what? They're gonna go for that one -- the vulnerable one. And that's really what we want to do -- make it much better for our clients. Make their car the one that's locked up tight with the alarm going.
Sean Martin: I hate to bring AI into this already, but there -- AI touches everything. Yeah, it does. So the search -- people are pumping searches into AI. It can pull information from different places and give you a story, not just a result of a search. To generate content -- kids are generating content, people are, businesses are generating content. Our CEO just went to this thing and is talking about this. So how does AI weave in through all this stuff, and how does what you do tackle some of the risks that it brings to the table?
[00:13:10] Dr. Chris Pierson: Yeah. Artificial intelligence has really -- it's the same types of attacks, the same things that have worked way back when. A confidence scheme of several hundred years ago is still a confidence scheme today. But with artificial intelligence, with the different chat engines that you have out there, the amount of information you're able to get, the speed at which you're able to get it, helps speed up the attack, makes the attacker better prepared for that directed attack. And it really, really has made those attacks much more successful.
Dr. Chris Pierson: For example, this morning we had an 8:30 AM two-hour learning lab at RSAC Conference. We're tackling the issue of deepfakes on executives. Now, executives are always out there -- they have the low, medium, or high-res images that are on the websites. They have a little video clip, a little audio clip. They have the thing about -- hey, Jennifer the CEO is married to Han, and they got the kids, Luke and Leia and Muffy and Fluffy the pets. And over here on a Saturday you can find them at Habitat for Humanity. Well, that's a lot of information -- a lot of OSINT data for an attacker.
[00:14:10] Dr. Chris Pierson: While they're able to harness that, they're able to get much more information from data brokers -- all of us bringing that together -- and have an actual attack pattern. But even then, they're able to grab those images, and the deepfakes they're able to create from those are second to -- the voice fakes they're able to create are amazing, especially for publicly traded companies. If you don't realize that on the earnings call -- those are high-quality recordings. And when they're going on MSNBC and CNBC and all the rest -- when they're going on those shows -- all those are high-quality images, high-quality video, and the voice recordings that are there. It just creates an amazing situation by which you're able to do a deepfake of the CEO or the CFO and get past all those traditional methods.
[00:15:10] Dr. Chris Pierson: Now, what we've seen is folks saying, oh, let's go do a plugin to Teams, or let's do a plugin to Zoom for AI detection. Look, anything is better than nothing. But how are you gonna protect me on my cell phone for a phone call, or a text message, or a WhatsApp, or a Signal? Or the plain old telephone line -- that old telephone line that's at the desk -- how do you protect that? And the only way to do so is to actually have something that is uniquely created to handle any situation where you want to make sure the other person that you are connected to -- somebody within the BlackCloak family circle of trust, folks that are executives at your company at GE, or individuals that are part of your family unit -- if you have them all part of the BlackCloak membership, we have kind of re-released, with some deeper features, the Impersonation Protection feature for BlackCloak.
[00:16:10] Dr. Chris Pierson: And what this does is it allows folks that are on the BlackCloak platform -- our members -- to be able to confirm by just saying how they were connected. Type up a little blurb: hey, we're talking on Zoom right now, so you click the Zoom button. We're talking on Zoom. You asked me to change the ESOP account, or you want $10,000 or $50,000 in gift cards? Mm-hmm. Sean -- is this really you? And I can push that message out. And if it's not really you, you're gonna get that on your phone through the BlackCloak application and say, no, it's not me. And the alarm bells will go off both in terms of your CISO as well as the BlackCloak team. Or if it really is you, you're able to confirm that it actually is you for some special project.
Dr. Chris Pierson: And to go ahead, we'll get those gift cards straight over to you. But being able to do that -- have the power within somebody's hands -- very easily done by that executive, by their husband, their wife, their kids, their spouses, significant other, or by the generations -- their mom and dad so to speak -- or others within the company -- be able to do so on a board call within the company and have everybody kind of code in and confirm that you are who you say you are online.
[00:17:10] Dr. Chris Pierson: Cybercriminals are coming, the nation states are coming. This is an area that we know is rife for exploitation, and we're just super excited to be able to get this feature, get this solution out there.
Sean Martin: Yeah, it comes to mind -- the bank or the credit card says, hey, you're not supposed to be in the desert at midnight at a gas station. But maybe you are, and if it's you, you say yes, right? But the fact that you're doing it on the app, and we have the circle of the family part of it -- it makes it easy. Because I remember -- and I mention this a lot -- a podcast we had with you and Cloutier. And we were rolling and we were talking about how even somebody like him, when it comes to an emotional moment, like the daughter or a family member -- even if you know 99.9% it's not real, you still have that emotion. So being able to just get on the app and say, hey, is that you? -- take the emotion away. Come back straight to reality.
[00:18:10] Dr. Chris Pierson: Right. Well, it is. You know, either slowing down time or getting in a helper are the two ways to stop those scams, those schemes, those frauds from occurring. And with Impersonation Protection, you're able to do that. Because you know you have a tool that you can rely upon, a feature within something that you can rely on to be able to verify that. It just is great. But yes, with Roland -- that was a great episode. We need people to come back and look at that. It's never gonna get old.
Marco Ciappelli: No. Listen, I want to end this with -- a couple of times you mentioned the word trust, and obviously that's the core of what BlackCloak does. It's based on trust, white glove. Yeah. Because there is a relationship that you build. But -- trust -- tell me about that. Close with that.
[00:19:10] Dr. Chris Pierson: Yeah. It's core. It's core to who we are. Core to our personas. It's core to the leadership team. It's core to every single person that we bring on board as a Cloaker here at BlackCloak. And it's really -- quite honestly -- that's why people choose BlackCloak. It's the trusted relationship that we have with the Chief Information Security Officer, with the Chief Security Officer. We're protecting your CEO, your CFO, your CIO. We're protecting those folks that are part of your team, your board members, and we're protecting their family members. It all has to start with trust and it just has to be continuous throughout the envelope -- it has to permeate throughout each and every experience that you have with one of our team members. And that's just really, really important.
Dr. Chris Pierson: As you guys know, because we've been friends for so incredibly long -- building a company like this can be difficult, right? As you get larger, into the hundreds of people -- because we want to make sure that everyone that comes on is a trusted employee, a trusted member of the BlackCloak team. And likewise, in terms of the folks that we work with, we want to make sure that trust is there. It's a trusted relationship that we have. It takes a long time for us to build. We really do pay a lot of time and attention to it. It's really important to who I am. And I am absolutely blessed to have the best executive team and board around me and around us and our team to be able to continue that through.
[00:20:10] Sean Martin: Yeah, I love it. So -- Luke and Leia -- if they get a call that says 'I am your father,' when they get that, they just go to the BlackCloak app. And they make sure that they don't have any storm troopers coming for them.
Dr. Chris Pierson: We will protect them. We'll take care of it. Yeah. And it's cool -- you can actually go and request a demo on the website. And I know we're going to do some work to show folks what that looks like as well. So I'm excited for that.
Marco Ciappelli: And I think there's no question -- we trust you implicitly. We hear it all over at RSAC Conference and any conference -- Black Hat, whatever. People respect you and value the work that you're doing. And yeah, it's super important. And I'm glad to know that you're succeeding with this vision. And sadly it's a necessity -- and you're making it real. So we're happy to stand with our clients and our members.
Dr. Chris Pierson: Love it. Love it.
[00:21:10] Sean Martin: So for those listening, be sure to check out BlackCloak, connect with Chris and the team, and stay tuned for more. As we chat more -- we're gonna catch up with you later at the end of the week and hear about some of the conversations you had. So stay tuned for that chat too.