Guarding the C-Suite: Defending Against AI Deepfakes and Beyond

Hey, everyone. We are back here live. We're at RSA Conference.

We're in Moscone West. I guess it must be getting near lunchtime, or the keynotes are opening, because I'm seeing a lot of people congregating down there. But let me introduce you to my next guest.

I hope I get this right. Chris Pierson? Yeah.

With Black Cloak. Yeah. I'm going to do this a little backwards.

I usually ask people to tell me a little bit about yourself. But as the founder, I founded three or four venture-backed companies in my day. You know this because you've done it.

We breathe life into our companies, especially early on. Oh, yeah. Right?

We are kind of the passion that they feed off of. A lot of people out here don't know Black Cloak, though, so let's start there. Yeah.

How would you describe Black Cloak to our audience? It's pretty simple. Black Cloak is the pioneer of digital executive protection.

We started in 2018. We're a team of about 150 Cloakers, all spread out throughout the US. We have clients in 42 countries.

Protect about the top 20% of the Fortune 100, top 25% of the Fortune 500. And at the end of the day, what does Black Cloak do? It does digital executive protection.

What that means is that we are protecting the corporate executives, the board, the C-suite, the executive leadership team, and their families, super important, in their personal lives. Especially right now. We see what's going on with the CVS, the- The threats are no higher.

They're just so incredibly high right now. Yeah. It's really important that you think about the attack surfaces that's outside the four walls of the company.

So once again, the CISO, the CSO, they take care of things on the inside four walls of the company. We're protecting the executive and their family members' personal privacy, personal cybersecurity, their home networks. They have three to five homes on average.

And then we add in our concierge, which is unlike anything else. It is literally an entire US-based security operations center, 24/7, that's watching, monitoring, protecting, reacting, and responding to any cyber and privacy needs they have. And look, in a post-UnitedHealthcare world, tragic events from December of 2024, that convergence that we've seen has only gotten worse in terms of physical and digital security protection.

I love it. So now I'm going to come back to what is usually my first question is, Chris, what led you to do this? Well, look, my background spans many different things.

A little bit of time as a DHS special government employee on privacy and cybersecurity, so we saw some of these threats coming at our defense industrial base companies firsthand. Background as a lawyer, 23 years as recovering a lawyer, started a cybersecurity practice at a large firm way back when. Former chief privacy officer for the Royal Bank of Scotland and two-time chief information security officer.

It was the threats that I saw on the intelligence community side as well as a CISO, where they were literally attacking outside the organization. You're not going to take down a defense industrial base company by hacking them directly. No.

But you can by targeting the board member- Bet that ... the CFO, the CEO, even maybe the person that's in legal that's in charge of intellectual property, and find out what's coming next before it hits. And then as a CISO, I saw the same thing in terms of our executives, our boards, our VCs.

Every time we announced a funding round and there was another wave of attacks that was happening. And so for us, it became really, really critical. How can I, how can my team, how can we protect our company by extending that layer of protection outside the four walls of the castle to them, their family members, and their personal lives?

So bottom line, like all great companies that start where you have a problem that is personal to you, that impacts you, impacts your team, you just got to go solve it. I love it. Before we segue into news here from RSA, people who want more information on Black Cloak, where can we send them?

io, and you can go talk to a member of our team there, see some demos, see some information, get some threat intel reports, all the rest. Really easy to do. Absolutely.

And I should mention, we've partnered with Black Cloak now over a year. It's not just executives, right? In today's world, high net worth individuals.

It is. It's a lot wider of a net than one would think when there's reasons for people to want to- Yeah ... exfiltrate, to want to slow down something, to want to have access to something.

And increasingly, things like character assassination, AI deepfakes, which we're- Oh, my ... going to talk about. But even think terrible physical things.

Kidnapping- Yeah ... and stuff like this, and terrorists. Never forget terrorists.

It has terror involved. Yep. And that's part of it.

It is a wide attack surface, right? It is those people that, if you think about it just in terms of high-value targets, corporate executives, C-suite, board members, as well as high net worth, ultra high net worth individuals, sports star, rock star, politician. These are folks that are in the limelight.

Today, AI scientists, right? Because these guys, they're making more money than baseball players, not to mention athletes and so forth. But Chris, I want to talk a little bit about RSA, RSAC.

Oh, yeah. We're here. Yeah.

You guys released some news around it. Three things. Yeah.

Let's go through them Yeah. So, this week Black Cloak announced the further deepening of our protection platform, and it really is a platform. It's technology that is brought together, that is holistic on the privacy, the cyber, the home, and that concierge front.

And so we did three different things announced out in the field. Number one, search suppression. So we've heard a lot about data broker removal.

These data broker websites, the Spokeo, the- Yep ... ZabySearch, the 411, all the data broker removers. It's absolutely necessary but totally insufficient in terms of actually hardening the attack surface for an executive and their family members.

So Black Cloak announced on Monday they released search suppression. So if there is personally identifiable information that is out there on the Google, let's just say, that we are able to actually suppress those links to make you, once again, a harder target to find. All engineered by a great team, and really, really we're super excited about this and the next step it provides for our clients.

I think a lot of us, Chris, have looked at this because we all see- Mm ... there's too much of our personal information out there. To a certain extent, it gets to be Whac-A-Mole.

It is. Right? What you kill today, it pops up over there.

Yep. How is this different? How do we not play the Whac-A-Mole game?

So no matter what, just the way privacy is not a fundamental human right in the United States, so your data's going to be out there, it's going to be bought, it's going to be sold, it's going to be transferred. So it is going to be a game of Whac-A-Mole. But what you have to do is actually solve it through other ways.

So when your information is out there exposed on the dark web, you have to make sure that you're changing the passwords, getting dual factor, and doing encrypted password vaults, but you have to do it with and for people. That's where the concierge comes in. When you have data broker information that is out there, yes, you have to go schedule it for review.

Search suppression takes it to the next level. But then what you have to do is really teach, uniquely teach individuals how to go ahead and leak less information, harden their cell phone, their tablet, their computer. Same things that we use in the government, but make the device 100% frictionless, friction-free.

So you just do what you want to do, but you're sharing less information about you and keeping that information out of the limelight. So those are some of the tips and tricks that we actually impart to our clients. And once again, we do it with them and for them, really the key.

Love it. Yeah. All right.

That was number one. Number one. What's number two?

Number two, just amazingly, amazingly proud of the team on this. It is travel advisory. So literally, you're traveling out to some 214 countries that Black Cloak has in its inventory.

We have the ability in live real time to be able to say, "Hey, here's the travel risks of the country. Here's the things that you should think about in these different cities. Here's where the embassy is.

Here's where resources are. " This is how we judge your activities, and we're able to do that on the fly for our corporate commercial clients as a bolt-on, as an additional add-on to the overall digital executive protection platform that they already know, love, and have. This has become really important in recent times with the conflict that is going on right now in Iran.

I was just going to say, it's pretty timely. Yep. With the conflict that occurred- It's not just Iran.

You've got the Ukrainian situation. Mexico, Ukraine, all over. Mexico cartels.

Yep. The world is a dangerous place right now. It is, and the key thing is this, the chief information security officer, the chief security officer, they're looking for a relationship partner, someone who can on the fly generate this travel advisory information for their key executives, for the executive leadership team members and board members that are traveling, moving about the world, sponsoring perhaps the Olympics.

They want the information. They want it at the tip of their fingers, and they also want, and we will be able to shortly this spring, provide all that information through one button click in the Black Cloak app to our members at certain different tier levels. So really, really excited.

This is where you combine good threat intel, good information, good intelligence with the actual physical, practical know-how, and actually in a formed product that, it's not going to be your 50-page product. This is really, really sharp. The notable quotables you need to know and get it right into the power of the person's hand immediately.

I love it. Yeah. I don't know if I should say this publicly, but I'm planning a trip in next month, and I started looking at some of the official- Yeah ...

travel advisories, and you're right. The signal-to-noise ratio in there, I don't know if I should get vaccinated for every disease known to man- Yeah ... or what else is happening.

But there- After RSA, this week at RSA, you're all set. Maybe I should, right? Yeah.

You're all set. You got exposed to everything. I did, right.

Touché. I was here in 2020. Yeah.

Left here and found out- Oh, yeah. I walked home with a few extra parting gifts. Yeah, exactly.

That year as well. Let's move to number three. Oh, number three.

How's that? Number three. Number three's really big, though, Tim.

Yeah. And, you know. Well, what's interesting about number three, the topic of deepfakes, especially AI-powered deepfakes.

Look, two years after this really became possible and feasible, right? We had that in February of 2024, you had the transfer from somebody who thought it was the CFO on with them from the Hong Kong institution. Hong Kong, yep.

$25 million. $25 million out the door. No guns used, no hacks, no this, no that.

Deepfake, and the technology for doing it live real time- It's gotten better ... it is amazing. It is amazing.

So here's what we did, a few different things. Number one, one of the smartest things possible, right? We powered up with Techstrong and had a survey done, all the rest in terms of how do we think about this?

How do we go ahead and actually figure out what is happening? And over 33% of the respondents said yes, in some form or fashion, they have been exposed to deepfakes about them. This is the cream of the top, right?

" This is really, really scary. And so here at RSAC, we, number one, we did a two-hour learning lab on this, right? Nothing about Black Cloak in there.

How do you think about it? What policies do you have? What procedures do you have?

What education do you, Mr. or Ms. To go ahead and tackle it.

Second, we, Black Cloak, have announced the re-release of impersonation protection. It's a feature within the Black Cloak application that allows for our members or people within that circle of trust, including family members, to be able to verify that I am actually on the phone with you because you uniquely have been approved to the Black Cloak platform. I'm on the Black Cloak platform.

We're logged in, we're synced in together on our devices, out of band, and whether it's a Zoom Meeting, a Teams meeting, a phone call on a regular old telephone line, a cell phone call, WhatsApp, Signal, whatever the cool things are that everyone's doing today, we can say, "Hey, hold on a minute. " Right? Yep.

" And we don't want to. We want to go ahead and you just open up the app, put in the person's name, go in and say, "Hey, I'm on a Zoom with you. We're talking about a new transfer of $10 million for the new penthouse we're getting.

" You send it. It does the biometrics on you on your phone, goes to your phone- Right ... does your biometrics, sends it back, location, and now we know through the power of Black Cloak, we can rest assured that- You're you ...

the other person is really you, and it's all nice and seamless, and it does not add any extra friction to the process. We're talking about five to 10 seconds to make a verification. Really, really groundbreaking technology.

We're super proud of it, super proud of the team. I love it. And look, this sounds a little thing, like a little bit out of Ocean's 11 or science fiction, but this is real.

As you said, it happened in Asia. I've seen with voice cloning, video cloning, and I'll tell you something, you know who the worst offenders are? It's these executives doing it themselves.

They're playing with things like Sora, the video maker, or other AI-enabled things. And I'll be honest with you, I'm guilty of it, too. You may be.

You're making likenesses of yourself in an AI environment. Once it's out there, other people could harvest that, too. What's even worse is when you think about this, your board, your C-suite, your executive leadership team, all on the website, About Us in Leadership page, they have the low-res, medium-res, high-res images out there.

They've got the audio clips from the different share earnings reports. They've got the video clips from them being on- That's all they need ... CNN, NBC, all the rest.

They already have everything out there. They got everything they need. And here's the thing is, no putting the genie back in the bottle, no digital watermarking, all this stuff.

Oh, stop. They're just chasing things. Literally, all the information's there.

What you have to do is just make sure that you have a way to make sure that your company doesn't lose money, intellectual property, have a breach as a result of it because you have a means and a mechanism to verify that through that closed loop network that the person is who they say they are, period. End of story. How can we get people over to here to check this out?

io. We love having the demos, showing the demos, grabbing people on board. But we're going to be pushing this out at a rapid pace to all of our existing clients and bringing on new folks onto the platform.

We got to really change the narrative and get out there ahead of it. Thank you, man. I appreciate it.

It's a pleasure. Absolute pleasure. Chris Pierson, founder, CEO of Black Cloak here, live at RSAC.

We're going to take a break. We're here all day, though. Stay tuned.

We'll be back in just a bit.