The Rook
Most security podcasts are built for practitioners. The Rook is built for the people who have to make decisions about security without being security experts. Hosted by David Shaw — CISSP, fractional vCISO, and GRC consultant with 20 years in the seat — The Rook delivers board-ready intelligence for founders, PE operating partners, M&A attorneys, and executives who own security risk when security isn’t their day job. Every episode covers one topic in depth with examples from a real incident, a regulatory development, a threat pattern, or a market shift. No vendor hype. No practitioner jargon. Just what it means for the business you're running or the deal you're working on — and what to do about it. New episodes every other Tuesday.
Episodes
That cybersecurity budget request about to land on the CFO's desk is full of acronyms and tool names, and the number probably went up again. This episode gives you five questions that turn it into a business decision you can defend from either side of the table.
Who it's for: CFOs and finance leaders who approve the budget, and the IT lead, security lead, MSP or vCISO who submits it.
The five questions:
- What would ...
Ransomware Without Downtime: The Shift to Data Exfiltration and Exposure
David Shaw explains that ransomware leverage is shifting from encrypting systems to stealing data and threatening public exposure, using Galaxy Warden’s report that Canadian immersive media company PHI Studio appeared on Nova Ransomware’s leak site on July 17 after data was exfiltrated. He argues this model particularly endan...
The $200,000 Security Leadership Gap: CISO, Internal Promotion, or Fractional vCISO
There are roughly 35,000 CISOs worldwide serving an estimated 359 million businesses. That 10,000-to-1 ratio is not a hiring problem. It's what the 2026 CISO Report from Cybersecurity Ventures and Sophos calls a market failure.
Most companies under $50 million in revenue never close that gap with a full-time hire; the math does...
CISA adding a vulnerability to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog isn't a patch reminder anymore. It's the moment your insurer and your counterparty's diligence team start treating you as someone who was on notice, and if you didn't patch, that's on you.
In this episode, David Shaw walks through how the KEV catalog moved from a federal compliance tool to a market-facing liability standard, the exploited vuln...
A clean audit doesn't tell you whether your company is secure. It tells you something much narrower, and the gap between what the audit answers and what executives read into it is where most companies are quietly carrying real risk.
In this episode, David Shaw walks through what compliance audits actually evaluate, the three places where compliance and real security pull apart inside companies (access management, det...
In this episode of The Rook, David Shaw, founder of Corvus Cybersecurity and principal vCISO, examines the most consistently overlooked risk in M&A transactions: inherited cyber exposure. From Yahoo's misrepresentation of its breach history during the Verizon acquisition to the Marriott-Starwood breach that went undetected for four years, the pattern is the same. Cybersecurity due diligence gets a questionnaire,...
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