Cynet, recently announced the appointment of MacKenzie Brown as Vice President of Threat Intelligence Strategy. In this new role, she will enhance Cynet’s commitment to continuously monitoring the threat landscape and informing customers of critical security events to accelerate response.
In this interview, MacKenzie talked about her background and current remit. She described an unorthodox career path through IT support, GRC, Optiv, Microsoft incident response, and Blackpoint before joining Cynet three months ago and emphasized her hands-on incident response, tabletop development, and public-facing threat education work.
She also discussed operational challenges and risk trends, as she outlined a distributed, 24/7 intake process with SLAs for consuming, analyzing, hunting, and communicating threats. She identified a persistent preparation gap in IR programs and recommended more frequent executive tabletop-style reviews tied to current breaches rather than annual exercises. She warned that identity has effectively become the new perimeter, highlighted data-governance gaps and AI-driven insider and data-loss risks, and argued that left-of-boom prevention remains critical because recovery after breach discovery remains difficult.
