E250 How AI Is Transforming Cybersecurity from Reactive to Predictive with Cytidel's Matt Conlon
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How did Matt Conlon’s consulting background lead to founding Cytidel?
I was lucky enough at 11 o'clock at night to be getting the phone call saying, it's instant response time, somebody's attacking us or someone's in, time to get them out. We can give you a heads up 200 days before these public models and other tool sets and capabilities on what should you be fixing? Can you get ahead of the game? And can you be moving more into that proactive space? We're also looking at the metrics around, well, what do hackers normally target? So that we can give you a heads up to say, look, that is a public facing risk. It's this particular type of risk. We think you should prioritize that ahead of some of the other stuff that people are saying you need to fix.
We are here and I'm chatting with Matt Conlon. Matt is the founder of CDL. Matt, thank you very much for joining us on the show today. Cheers, Mark. Thanks very much for having me. So jump back 5, 10, 15, 20 years. What was your journey to now?
Yeah, so I started out in consulting, worked in public sector and did a lot of work in policing for years. working in all things network security, firewalls, email, identity. I did a stint in encryption, which I quickly took off my CV. And then I wanted to go to public sector, into private, so moved into banking. Worked in threat intelligence, security operations, did a lot in vulnerability management, security architecture, and then just to add on top, I was doing incident response. So my day job was very much looking at what are hackers targeting in the morning. That was kind of 7 a.m. to half nine. then running some of the operations during the day on what we're going to fix. And out of the hundreds of thousands, if not millions of different security risks that we had, what were the two that we were going to fix that day?
And then I was lucky enough at 11 o'clock at night to be getting the phone call saying it's incident response time, somebody's attacking us or someone's in, time to get them out. And so, yeah.
And this was all professional services?
All professional services, all in consulting.
Which I think is just the best possible career.
Oh, amazing start. Like if you want to learn quick, that's where to do it.
I'm guessing it's totally overwhelming because like suddenly you're an expert in this, go and figure it out.
Or you get thrown in being like, you're an expert in this. You've got to figure it out, but you've never seen it before. So yeah, it's a great place to learn and phenomenal place to start a career.
What burnout experiences inspired the mission to solve alert overload?
Yeah, so you're taking on your fee, coming up with different ways, you're wearing different hats, different sectors, and you're working in a sector such as, you know, policing. That is so important. You're dealing with proper stuff.
Yeah, it was a lot of fun. And again, you work with amazing people, like from all walks of life, all different skills and capabilities. And yeah, so policing, then into banking, everything's operational. You can't go down. Downtime costs a lot of money.
And then the better you do, the more they destroy it, right?
Oh, 100%. Yeah, that was, I don't know, maybe that was why I left it in the end. But yeah.
And what were you doing, kind of 60, 80 hours just burnout?
It was burnout, yeah. So I was doing long hours. Even at weekends, I'd be scrolling on my phone, looking at, right, what are the next cyber attacks? What are threat actors targeting? What are the next patches needed or vulnerabilities coming out? And it was just constant. So I always had that fear of, what am I missing? Or where am I going to be attacked on Monday? So you couldn't even get your weekends off.
I remember this funny line from Starsky and Hutch. I think it was Ben Stiller that said it. It was like, oh yeah, don't worry, crime's calling in sick. It's fine today.
Yeah.
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I don't think they stop at five o'clock. I think Friday afternoons was the worst. From two o'clock onwards, it was like, right now we're going to attack.
So the new business opportunity, what drove that?
Yeah, I suppose it was down to the burnout. So I left. I joined a phenomenal company where I helped them get ISO 27001 certified.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
How did Matt Conlon’s consulting background lead to founding Cytidel?
0:00–2:13
2
What burnout experiences inspired the mission to solve alert overload?
2:13–3:40
3
How does Cytidel’s AI predict cyber threats 200+ days before public exploits?
3:40–6:20
4
Why did Cytidel shift from services to a product‑first model?
6:20–8:45
5
What is exposure management and how does it extend beyond internal vulnerabilities?
8:45–11:40
6
How are machine‑learning models trained to prioritize emerging risks?
11:40–14:12
7
What ROI and growth results has Cytidel achieved with its AI platform?
14:12–16:47
8
How is Cytidel preparing for the rapid evolution of AI‑driven attacks?
16:47–20:00
Speakers
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