Part 1: US CISOs talk mental wellness for cyber security professionals and why it’s important

In the modern world where cyber criminals conduct ever more sophisticated attacks, with many an automated barrage to find and exploit the weakest links, burnout among CISOs and cyber security workers has never been more prevalent, but as Cybermindz.org has demonstrated, burnout recovery is real – as is burnout prevention – but how is this done?

Cybermindz.org, which celebrates its first birthday this month, launched in Australia in June 2022 to support mental wellbeing in the cyber community. Founded by Peter Coroneos, the organisation recognises that many cyber security professionals – the very people that defend our digital, and thus actual, reality – are themselves under sustained and increasing stress, and so Cybermindz set about providing direct intervention to restore and rebuild emotional and cognitive health and alleviate suffering.

Given Peter and his team’s long history of being cyber professionals themselves, they clearly understood first hand the situation their colleagues, clients and customers find themselves in.

Cybermindz.org provides resources and support to lift its peers back into mental wellness and thereby strengthen cybersecurity generally, with its audience not just cyber professionals they want to help, but their clients and those who suffer as victims of attacks, their staff, and anyone in the cyber community who may be feeling a little overwhelmed.

An idea whose time has arisen, the need for the ideas, solutions and the neuroscience-based iRest Protocol that Cybermindz presents has continued growing exponentially, and has arrived at the right time to help a troubled world preserve its most important assets.

These assets include human beings: humanity itself and human capital, brainpower, ideas, ideals, wisdom, empathy, knowledge, mentorship and more, teaching not only how to recover from burnout, but how to genuinely prevent it in the first place – and how to build an unbreakable wellbeing.

Below, I present two video interviews, the first with PayPal CISO, Assaf Keren, and the second with John Checco, Resident CISO for Financial Services at Proofpoint, both of whom were part of the US launch of Cybermindz.org, the highlights of which are also embedded below.

Let’s start with the video interview I conducted with Assaf Keren, PayPal CISO:

Here is the second video interview, this is with John Checco, a Resident CISO for Financial Services at Proofpoint:

For some additional background, you can also read about and watch the Sydney and Melbourne launches of Cybermindz in 2022 as excellent background, but this video of highlights from Cybermindz.org’s US launch alongside the RSA 2023 Conference in San Francisco provides an incredibly good summary of the issues faced today, and the solutions, in just over five minutes:

I also spoke with the founder of iRest.org, Dr Richard Miller, about his involvement with Cybermindz.org and being appointed as the Chairman of the Cybermindz Global Advisory Board.