Brian Wagner has led an extraordinary career in cybersecurity and technology, holding senior positions at Amazon Web Services as Head of Compliance in Financial Services, and as Chief Technology Officer at Bulletproof, Defense.com, and Revenir. His expertise has guided global organisations through the complex challenges of compliance, data protection, and digital transformation.
Widely recognised as an innovation speaker, Brian combines deep technical knowledge with strategic insight, showing businesses how security can become a catalyst for growth. He works with leaders across industries to align cloud strategy, risk management, and innovation in a way that drives resilience and competitiveness.
In this exclusive interview with The Motivational Speakers Agency, Brian Wagner explores the evolving cyber threat landscape, the human factor in data breaches, and why embedding security into culture is critical to powering future innovation.
Q1. Cyber-attacks are rising in both scale and sophistication. What practical measures should businesses prioritise today to strengthen their defences?
Brian Wagner: “Well, I think absolute top tips need to be easy to implement and realistic. So I think number one is use a password manager. A lot of the breaches we see now are due to commonly used passwords or passwords that are leaked on the internet. That’s probably the absolute number one, easiest way to prevent a breach.
“Another one is to be vigilant on the email side. If you’re not familiar with the term, phishing is a way to get people to send information — your username, password, or bank details. When we’re talking about businesses, if someone gets phished it’s typically for their credentials, and then somebody uses those credentials to log in and wreak havoc. So the takeaway is really to be sceptical of all emails.
“One more very useful tip for businesses is to enable multi-factor authentication on third-party services. Everything is subscription now, you pay monthly for just about every piece of software, and there are logins everywhere.
“If you do lose your password, or the password is given up, with multi-factor authentication in place even someone with that password — if they don’t have that second factor of authentication — can’t use it.
“Like I said, there’s more to it, but really from a realistic “what can I do right now, what can I do tomorrow” kind of perspective, those are absolutely the best.”
Q2. Despite growing investment in cybersecurity, data breaches remain common. From your perspective, what is the primary cause of these incidents?
Brian Wagner: “Sadly, it’s human beings. Humans are trusting by nature; it’s just ingrained into our being. Statistically, phishing is the leading cause of breaches, and people are the weakness.
“Traditionally, before email was a big thing, the exploit would be more physical. For example, someone might walk into a front office and say, “I’m late for a job interview, can you please print my CV?” They’d hand over a USB stick, and when that was plugged in it would breach the system.
“These days, especially with remote working, phishing is absolutely on the rise. But to answer your question more broadly, people are unfortunately the weakest link in any organisation when it comes to data security.”
Q3. As technology evolves rapidly, new risks are constantly emerging. What do you see as the next major style of cyber-attack businesses should prepare for?
Brian Wagner: “Ooh, the next big one… I think it’s going to be linked to the strides we’re making in quantum computing and other futuristic computing power. As compute power becomes more powerful, there’ll come a time when our current encryption mechanisms will be rendered useless.
“It may not be the very next one, but if you look at how encryption is done today and how data is protected digitally, there’s a time in the not-so-distant future when that will be able to be broken within a reasonable amount of time by quantum computing or just generally more powerful compute.”
Q4. Ransomware remains one of the most disruptive threats to organisations. If a company is financially extorted by hackers, what is the correct response?
Brian Wagner: “First of all, do not pay them. That is the absolute number one thing to do. The reason we have cyber crime and ransomware attacks is because it’s lucrative. If it didn’t make anyone any money, no one would do it.
“Number two would be to figure out what the impact is. Ideally, if you’ve already been backing up and archiving data, then it would be an inconvenience at worst. If the data never becomes unencrypted, you’d still have a backup. The inconvenience is the time it takes to restore that data — which is an outage, but still only an inconvenience.
“The other side is that it depends on what data is stolen or ransomed. If the attacker decides to exploit that data — whether personal information, customer information, or internal data — you have an obligation to notify those people, not just under GDPR but as a respectable business.
“You should absolutely reach out and say: this is what’s happened, here’s what we think was taken, you need to be vigilant.
“But rule number one: don’t pay them.”
Q5. Since the introduction of GDPR, businesses have had to rethink how they handle data. How has this regulation changed the way organisations manage and protect client information?
Brian Wagner: “The introduction of GDPR has really transformed how businesses manage people’s data. It’s put a lot of responsibility on how data is handled.
“Before GDPR, globally data was often treated very casually. Companies would say: “Wow, we can just look at all this data and make money from it.” It was a revenue stream. GDPR makes you really think about how that data is used and shared.
“For companies who weren’t really looking after their data, it’s been an inconvenience because they’ve had to restructure how they store and share it. Asking for consent from every individual wasn’t something many businesses were used to doing.
“But what GDPR has really done is bring responsibility and consideration into how you build infrastructure and protect data. And that is good for everybody — it’s beneficial for the whole world, for businesses and individuals alike.”
This exclusive interview with Brian Wagner was conducted by Mark Matthews of The Motivational Speakers Agency.
