Cybersecurity discourse often orbits buzzwords while adversaries operate in stark realism. The sector faces a clarity deficit rather than a tooling shortage. In testimony before the United States Senate Armed Services Committee, former National Security Agency Director and founder of IronNet Cybersecurity, General Keith B. Alexander, had issued a stark strategic clarion call: the nation’s cyber policy and defensive architecture lag significantly behind the accelerating threats that define the digital era. Alexander warned that existing organizational constructs and disconnected defense postures are insufficient to defend critical systems at scale and urged a joint, disciplined cyber strategy across public and private spheres.

The CyberTech Top Voice Interview Series emerges from that imperative — to surface signal over noise, practitioners over commentators, and operational credibility over theoretical opinion. I’m Sudipto Ghosh, hosting conversations with architects of cyber defense shaped through live incident response, infrastructure protection, and adversarial confrontation rather than conference rhetoric.

This edition features Bobby Ford, Chief Strategy and Experience Officer at Doppel, carrying nearly three decades of frontline experience across military cyber operations, Fortune-scale enterprise defense, plus executive risk governance. A founding member of the Pentagon Computer Incident Response Team plus former CISO across organizations including Abbott, Unilever, Exelis, plus Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Bobby represents a rare lineage of operators seasoned through national infrastructure defense, regulated industry security, plus global enterprise protection.

Current threat theater has shifted decisively from perimeter intrusion toward human-centric deception. Modern adversaries manipulate identities, narratives, plus trust pathways before touching infrastructure. Platforms such as Doppel arise at this inflection point, addressing the fastest-expanding attack surface across modern security environments: social engineering spanning fragmented communication ecosystems.

This dialogue explores AI-driven impersonation campaigns reshaping defensive doctrine, trust verification emerging as a strategic priority, plus resilience architectures engineered for adversarial machine-speed conditions.

Here’s the full interview.

Hi Bobby, welcome to the CyberTech Top Voice program. Tell us about your role at Doppel and how you started in the cybersecurity industry.

Currently, I serve as the Chief Strategy and Experience Officer for Doppel, an AI-native social engineering defense company protecting individuals and organizations from AI-powered impersonation, phishing, fraud, and social engineering.

I have nearly three decades of experience, including the last 14 years as a CISO, but before building my career in corporate security, I enlisted in the U.S. Army to avoid burdening my family with the cost of college. It was there that I gained my first exposure to information security and went on to become a founding member of the Pentagon Computer Incident Response Team. Since then, I have built and led cybersecurity programs across the Aerospace and Defense industry, serving as the first CISO at Exelis Inc. and the architect of ITT’s global cybersecurity audit function under DOJ oversight.

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What are Doppel’s core offerings? How does the Doppel Platform fit into the modern CISO’s cybersecurity technology stack in 2026?

At its core, Doppel is an AI-native social engineering defense platform designed to protect organizations, executives, employees, and customers from impersonation, phishing, fraud, and digital reputation attacks wherever people actually communicate. That means social media, messaging apps, collaboration tools, domains, and increasingly video and voice, not just email.

The Doppel Vision Platform is built on two tightly integrated capabilities: the Doppel Threat Graph and Doppel Simulation.

The Doppel Threat Graph continuously maps the real-world social engineering attack surface. Powered by live threat intelligence and attacker TTPs, it identifies impersonation attempts, fraudulent identities, and coordinated deception campaigns across social platforms, messaging apps, domains, and collaboration tools. This provides organizations with a dynamic, attacker-centric view of how they are being targeted in practice, not in theory.

In 2025, 65% of organizations experienced social engineering attacks via non-email channels. Traditional phishing click tests are no longer effective as attackers increasingly operate through social platforms and messaging apps. Doppel Simulation uses insights from the Doppel Threat Graph to launch coordinated, real-world simulations across email, SMS, WhatsApp, and Telegram. These simulations are not static training exercises. They are adaptive, intelligence-driven campaigns designed to mirror how real attackers operate today.

Autonomous AI agents generate hyper-realistic, role-specific scenarios tailored to how individuals actually work and communicate, enabling organizations to measure, validate, and improve their true social engineering defense capability.

Together, the Doppel Vision Platform fits into the CISO stack as a horizontal, AI-driven trust and identity defense layer. It complements identity, endpoint, and network security by addressing the fastest-growing attack surface in modern security: human-centered deception.

Doppel’s platform uniquely blends AI with social engineering defense to protect brands and employees across multi-channel attacks. How do you see the role of advanced cybersecurity solutions evolving to enhance both security posture and customer experience for enterprise organizations in the next 2–3 years?

The most effective cybersecurity solutions are the ones that protect trust without creating friction. We’re already seeing phishing move beyond email into social feeds, chat threads, texts, and video calls – fundamentally changing how security intersects with the user and customer experience.

I believe advanced security platforms must operate invisibly and intelligently, detecting and stopping attacks in real time without requiring employees or customers to become security experts. Even as platforms take on more of the heavy lifting, organizations still need adaptive training and simulation that reflects this expanding threat surface, helping people build intuition and confidence without turning them into security specialists. AI-driven social engineering defense allows organizations to strengthen their security posture while actually improving confidence and engagement across digital channels. When security works at machine speed and aligns with how people communicate, it becomes an enabler of the business rather than a blocker.

With attackers using AI to create hyper-personalized impersonations and deepfake-style campaigns, what strategies and technologies do you believe are most effective today for protecting organizations and their customers from AI-powered social engineering threats?

The most effective strategy today is to meet AI-powered attacks with AI-powered defense while actively protecting digital reputation. Attackers are already using AI to mimic tone, cadence, urgency, and emotional context across text, voice, and video, eroding trust in brands and individuals alike. No amount of manual review or traditional tooling can scale to match that level of speed, realism, or reputational risk.

That’s where platforms like Doppel come into play. Doppel uses agentic AI to continuously analyze identity signals, behavioral patterns, and communication context across social, messaging, and emerging channels to understand intent, not just content. By correlating signals into complete attacker campaigns, the platform can autonomously detect and disrupt impersonation and fraud at machine speed, protecting both users and the organization’s reputation before employees or customers are exposed.

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Human risk remains central to many breaches. How does Doppel’s approach to Human Risk Management, combining simulations, training, and real-world threat modeling, contribute to reducing risk while also improving internal and external stakeholder confidence and experience?

Doppel’s Human Risk Management solution helps organizations reduce security risk by addressing the behaviors most exploited in modern attacks. Rather than treating training as a standalone compliance activity, the platform integrates security awareness training, social engineering simulation, and real-world threat intelligence into a continuous, adaptive program aligned to how attacks actually occur.

This approach reduces risk by helping employees recognize subtle manipulation techniques and reinforcing clear verification behaviors. Just as importantly, it builds confidence with executives, boards, and customers by showing that the organization is proactively managing digital trust and reputation risk. As AI blurs the line between real and synthetic, trust can no longer be assumed. It has to be actively verified, and organizations that prepare their people for that reality will be far more resilient and credible.

Looking at the growing sophistication of modern threats beyond traditional phishing (including deepfake messaging and cross-platform impersonations), what advice would you give to security teams about prioritizing investments in AI-enabled defenses versus human-centric awareness and resilience programs?

As social engineering expands beyond email into deepfake messaging and cross-platform impersonation, security teams should resist viewing AI-enabled defenses and human awareness as an either-or decision. Effective defense now requires both working together.

AI-driven platforms are critical for operating at machine speed across fragmented communication channels. They can detect impersonation patterns, anomalous behavior, and emerging attack techniques in real time, reducing risk without adding friction for users. Without this layer, organizations place an unrealistic burden on people to spot threats that move faster than human judgment alone.

At the same time, humans remain part of the attack surface. Awareness programs must evolve beyond static training into realistic, ongoing simulation that mirrors how modern attacks actually occur. The goal is not to turn employees into security experts, but to build intuition, confidence, and appropriate response behaviors.

Finally, which industry leader or practitioner would you like to see featured next in the CyberTech Top Voice program?

Dylan DeAnda, Field CTO at Doppel

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Thank you so much, Bobby, for answering all our questions! We look forward to having you again at the CyberTech Top Voice program.

To participate in our interviews, please write to our CyberTech Media Room at info@intentamplify.com