Publisher's summary

Founded in 2015, ITSPmagazine began as a vision for a publication positioned at the critical intersection of technology, cybersecurity, and society. What started as a written publication has evolved into a comprehensive repository for all their content—podcasts, articles, event coverage, interviews, videos, panels, and everything they create. This is where Sean Martin and Marco Ciappelli talk about cybersecurity, technology, society, music, storytelling, branding, conference coverage, and whatever else catches their attention. Over a decade of conversations exploring how these worlds collide, influence each other, and shape the human experience. This is where you'll find it all.
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Episodes
  • Do You Know What's In Your Software? A Cybersecurity Story with Manifest Cyber | A Brand Highlight Conversation with Daniel Bardenstein, Co-Founder at Manifest Cyber

    Do You Know What's In Your Software? A Cybersecurity Story with Manifest Cyber | A Brand Highlight Conversation with Daniel Bardenstein, Co-Founder at Manifest Cyber
    Feb 26 2026
    There is a question that sounds almost embarrassingly simple. After a vulnerability is discovered in a piece of widely used software — something like Log4Shell, which shook the security world and left hundreds of thousands of organizations exposed overnight — the question organizations scrambled to answer was this: where is this code, and what does it touch? Most couldn't answer it. Not the Fortune 500 companies. Not the government agencies. Not the critical infrastructure operators. Not the hospitals or the banks or the utilities. They had built and bought mountains of software over years and decades, and when the moment came to understand what was actually inside it, they were effectively blind. That gap is exactly what Daniel Bardenstein set out to close when he co-founded Manifest Cyber in 2023. And in a conversation on ITSPmagazine's Brand Highlight series, he made a case for technology transparency that is hard to argue with — not because it's technically complex, but because the analogy he draws is so strikingly obvious once you hear it. "If you want to buy a house, you get to go inside the house, do the home inspection," he said. "You want to buy food from the grocery store — you can look at the ingredients. Even our clothes tell you what they're made of, how to care for them, and where they're from." But software? The technology running hospital MRI machines, weapon systems, financial infrastructure, water delivery? No transparency required. No ingredient label. No inspection rights. Just trust. That trust, as Log4Shell demonstrated, is a vulnerability in itself. Bardenstein came to this problem with credentials that few founders in the space can claim. Before starting Manifest, he spent four and a half years in the US government leading large-scale cyber programs and serving as technology strategy lead at CISA — the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. He saw firsthand how defenders are perpetually at a disadvantage, operating without the basic visibility they need to do their jobs. His mission became building the tools to change that. The problem, he's quick to point out, has not improved in the years since Log4Shell. Software supply chain attacks have multiplied — XZ Utils, NPM Polyfill, and others following the same pattern: trusted software becomes the attack vector, and it spreads fast. Meanwhile, most security teams are still operating with SCA tools that generate noisy, overwhelming alerts and vendor risk programs built on Excel spreadsheets and questionnaires rather than actual empirical data about the security of what they're buying. "Security teams have a false sense of security," Bardenstein said. The gap between what organizations think they know and what they actually know about their software supply chains remains dangerously wide. Manifest Cyber addresses this across the full lifecycle. For organizations that build software, the platform maps every open source dependency, assesses it for risk, and ensures developers can write more secure code without losing velocity. For organizations that buy software — which is everyone — it finds risks before procurement, then continuously monitors every third party component so that when something breaks, they know the blast radius in seconds, not weeks. The timing matters. Regulation is catching up to the problem. The EU AI Act, the Cyber Resilience Act, and a growing body of global policy are beginning to demand exactly the kind of software supply chain transparency that Manifest is built to provide. Organizations that wait to build this capability will find themselves scrambling to comply — those that build it in now will have it as a competitive advantage. The ingredient label for software has always been missing. Manifest Cyber is writing it. ________________________________________________________________ Marco Ciappelli interviews Daniel Bardenstein, CEO & Co-Founder of Manifest Cyber, for ITSPmagazine's Brand Highlight series. HOST Marco Ciappelli — Co-Founder & CMO, ITSPmagazine | Journalist, Writer & Branding Advisor 🌐 https://www.marcociappelli.com 🌐 https://www.itspmagazine.com GUEST Daniel Bardenstein, CEO and Co-Founder of Manifest Cyber https://www.linkedin.com/in/bardenstein RESOURCES Manifest Cyber: https://www.manifestcyber.com Are you interested in telling your story? ▶︎ Full Length Brand Story: https://www.studioc60.com/content-creation#full ▶︎ Brand Spotlight Story: https://www.studioc60.com/content-creation#spotlight ▶︎ Brand Highlight Story: https://www.studioc60.com/content-creation#highlight KEYWORDS Manifest Cyber, software supply chain security, SBOM, Log4Shell, open source vulnerability, technology transparency, Daniel Bardenstein, CISA, software composition analysis, third party risk, EU Cyber Resilience Act, AppSec Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
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    7 mins
  • New Book! Lost in Time — Our Forgotten and Vanishing Knowledge | Forgotten Technology, Ancient Wisdom & Digital Amnesia | An Interview with Jack R. Bialik | An Analog Brain In A Digital Age With Marco Ciappelli

    New Book! Lost in Time — Our Forgotten and Vanishing Knowledge | Forgotten Technology, Ancient Wisdom & Digital Amnesia | An Interview with Jack R. Bialik | An Analog Brain In A Digital Age With Marco Ciappelli
    Feb 23 2026
    New Book: Lost in Time — Our Forgotten and Vanishing Knowledge | An Interview with Jack R. Bialik | An Analog Brain In A Digital Age With Marco Ciappelli There's a particular arrogance embedded in how we talk about progress. We speak about innovation as if it moves in one direction only — forward, upward, smarter, faster. But what if the line isn't straight? What if it loops, doubles back, and occasionally vanishes entirely? That's the uncomfortable question at the center of my conversation with Jack R. Bialik. His book Lost in Time: Our Forgotten and Vanishing Knowledge doesn't read like a history lesson. It reads like a case file — evidence, example by example, that the civilization we assume is the most advanced in human history is also, in some critical ways, deeply amnesiac. Take cataract surgery. We learned it in the 1700s, right? Except we didn't. Indians were performing it in 800 BC. The ancient Egyptians and Babylonians had diagrams of the procedure dating back to 2,400 BCE. The knowledge existed, worked, and then — somewhere in the chaos of collapsing empires and burning libraries — it vanished. We didn't progress past it. We forgot it, and then reinvented it from scratch, centuries later, convinced we were doing something new. Or the Baghdad Battery: clay pots, 2,000 years old, that when filled with acid can generate 1.1 volts of electricity. We don't know what they used them for. We don't know who figured it out. We just know it worked, it existed, and then it didn't anymore. This is what Bialik calls the pattern of loss — and it's not random. It follows catastrophe: the Library of Alexandria, the systematic destruction of Mayan records, the slow erosion of oral traditions as writing systems took over. Knowledge disappears when the systems that carry it collapse. And here's where the conversation gets uncomfortably relevant: we are building those systems right now, and we are not thinking about how long they'll last. The curator at the Computer History Museum told Bialik that to preserve the data from early IBM PCs and Macintosh computers, they had to print it on paper. The floppy drives had become brittle. The formats were unreadable. The digital archive was failing — and the only solution was to go analog. A vinyl record from the 1920s still plays. A CD from the 1980s may not survive another decade. I've been thinking about this since we recorded. My brain is analog — that's not just a podcast title, it's a philosophy. I grew up in Florence, surrounded by things that had survived centuries because they were made to last: stone, fresco, manuscript. Then I jumped on the digital train like everyone else, seduced by infinite libraries on my phone, music on demand, knowledge at my fingertips. But what Bialik is pointing out is that fingertips are fragile. And so are hard drives. The deeper issue isn't storage format. It's the distinction Bialik draws between knowledge and wisdom. Knowledge is the data — the cataract surgery technique, the battery design, the pyramid engineering. Wisdom is knowing why it matters, when to use it, and what the consequences might be. We've gotten extraordinarily good at accumulating knowledge. We are considerably worse at transmitting wisdom. And wisdom, Bialik argues, doesn't live in databases. It lives in the space between people — in stories, in teaching, in the slow transmission of judgment across generations. That's why oral tradition survived when everything else failed. Not because it was more sophisticated, but because it was more human. It didn't require a device to run on. I don't know how to solve the digital longevity problem. Neither does Bialik — not yet. But I think the first step is admitting we have one. That's actually one of the quietest, most powerful arguments in the book: be humble. We don't know everything. We never did. And some of the things we've lost might be exactly what we need right now. The question isn't just what we've forgotten. It's what we're forgetting today, while we're too busy scrolling to notice. Grab Lost in Time: Our Forgotten and Vanishing Knowledge — link below — and spend some time with a perspective that goes very, very far back. Which is maybe the only way to see very, very far forward. And if this kind of conversation is what you come here for, subscribe to the newsletter at marcociappelli.com. More of this. Less noise. — Marco Ciappelli Co-Founder ITSPmagazine & Studio C60 | Creative Director | Branding & Marketing Advisor | Personal Branding Coach | Journalist | Writer | Podcast: An Analog Brain In A Digital Age ⚠️ Beware: Pigs May Fly | 🌎 LAX🛸FLR 🌍 ____________ About Marco Marco Ciappelli is Co-Founder & CMO of ITSPmagazine, Co-Founder & Creative Director of Studio C60, Branding & Marketing Advisor, Personal Branding Coach, Journalist, Writer, and Host of An Analog Brain In A Digital Age podcast. Born in Florence, Italy, and based in Los Angeles, he explores the ...
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    34 mins
  • The Autonomous SOC Is No Longer a Dream | A Brand Highlight Conversation with Subo Guha, Senior Vice President of Product Management of Stellar Cyber

    The Autonomous SOC Is No Longer a Dream | A Brand Highlight Conversation with Subo Guha, Senior Vice President of Product Management of Stellar Cyber
    Feb 22 2026

    What does it take to turn the dream of an autonomous SOC into something organizations can actually deploy? Subo Guha, Senior Vice President of Product Management at Stellar Cyber, joins Sean Martin to share how the company's AI-driven security operations platform is making that vision a reality. Stellar Cyber serves SOC teams across more than 50 countries, with a primary focus on MSPs and MSSPs supporting the underserved mid-market, though marquee enterprise customers like Canon are also part of the portfolio.

    How can agentic AI change the way SOC teams handle alert overload? Guha describes what he calls a "digital army" of AI agents that work around the clock to automate alert triage and catch phishing attacks. The system filters 70 to 80 percent of incoming alerts, allowing analysts to focus on the 20 percent that matter most. With attackers using AI to launch faster and more frequent campaigns, Stellar Cyber takes a human-augmented approach, meaning the AI learns from analyst interactions and continuously guides the SOC team toward faster, more accurate remediation.

    Why does this matter for MSPs operating on thin margins? Guha explains that the autonomous SOC capability layered on top of Stellar Cyber's XDR platform allows MSSPs to serve more customers, reduce mean time to repair, and grow their tenant base without proportionally increasing staff. When MSSPs grow revenue, Stellar Cyber grows alongside them, creating a mutually beneficial model that ultimately means more organizations get protected.

    This is a Brand Highlight. A Brand Highlight is a ~5 minute introductory conversation designed to put a spotlight on the guest and their company. Learn more: https://www.studioc60.com/creation#highlight

    GUEST

    Subo Guha, Senior Vice President of Product Management, Stellar Cyber @LinkedIn

    RESOURCES

    Learn more about Stellar Cyber: https://stellarcyber.ai

    Are you interested in telling your story?
    ▶︎ Full Length Brand Story: https://www.studioc60.com/content-creation#full
    ▶︎ Brand Spotlight Story: https://www.studioc60.com/content-creation#spotlight
    ▶︎ Brand Highlight Story: https://www.studioc60.com/content-creation#highlight

    KEYWORDS

    Subo Guha, Stellar Cyber, Sean Martin, brand story, brand marketing, marketing podcast, brand highlight, autonomous SOC, agentic AI, security operations, XDR, NDR, MSSP, MSP, alert triage, AI-driven security, Open XDR, Gartner Magic Quadrant, phishing detection, SOC automation


    Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
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    8 mins
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