Bronwyn Boyle can talk about software vulnerabilities for hours. Talking about her own — the burnout she didn’t recognize until someone named it — turned out to be harder, and more important. We sat down at InfoSecurity Europe to talk about the human cost of guarding the machine, and whether our analog brains were ever built for this.
PODCAST EPISODE | An Analog Brain In A Digital Age — On Location at InfoSecurity Europe 2026
On Location With Sean Martin And Marco Ciappelli
Bronwyn Boyle can talk about software vulnerabilities for hours. Talking about her own — the burnout she didn’t recognize until someone named it — turned out to be harder, and more important. We sat down at InfoSecurity Europe to talk about the human cost of guarding the machine, and whether our analog brains were ever built for this.
📺 Watch | 🎙️ Listen | marcociappelli.com
I never planned to spend time in cybersecurity. My partner Sean dragged me in, and I arrived with a sociologist’s suspicion and a communication person’s questions, looking for the humans behind the firewalls. For years the field answered me in acronyms and threat charts. Then, at InfoSecurity Europe, Bronwyn Boyle said something that cut straight through all of it.
We can talk about vulnerabilities for hours, she told me. We just can’t talk about vulnerability when it hits us.
That sentence is the whole story.
Bronwyn is the CISO of PPRO, a payments company, and a board member of Cybermindz, a non-profit that exists to look after the mental health of the people who guard everyone else’s. She came to security the long way around, through a degree in classics and philosophy, which may be why she still hears the human note in a room full of machines. A few years ago she was running CISO roles and quietly coming apart, and she had no word for it. She met Peter Coroneos, who founded Cybermindz, heard him describe the symptoms of burnout, and recognized herself in the list. The expert on resilience could not see her own exhaustion from the inside of it.
This profession breaks people, and it is not only the hours. Defenders have to be right every time. The attacker needs to be right once. You live with that asymmetry the way you would live beside a fault line, and Bronwyn, the classicist, reaches for the oldest word for it: the Achilles heel, the single unguarded spot that undoes everything around it. Add constant alerts, a culture that treats stress as the cost of entry, and a quiet hero complex that makes asking for help feel like failure, and you build a workforce that is brilliant at protecting systems and hopeless at protecting itself.
For years we filed all of that under the job description. This is what you signed up for. Bronwyn’s point, and mine, is that we were wrong, and the bill is finally arriving. Cybermindz has the numbers: most incident responders have reached for mental health support because of the work, and most security chiefs are watching good people walk away over stress. Burnout stopped being a private misfortune and became a line on the risk register.
Their answer is almost stubbornly human. At its core is iRest, a protocol the US military built to bring traumatized soldiers back from the edge, now adapted for people who spend their days braced for the next breach. It teaches the nervous system how to climb down from fight-or-flight. Bronwyn calls it getting off the hamster wheel. I would call it remembering you have a body.
We keep plugging our slow, analog brains into an always-on machine, then treating the strain as a personal weakness. Ask a human nervous system to run at server speed and it breaks down on schedule. We call that a failing. It is closer to physics. We scenario-test our systems for recovery, and we almost never scenario-test ourselves.
So what do we carry forward, and what do we leave behind? We carry the care, the thing that pulled most of these people into the work to begin with. We leave behind the lie that the care has to cost you yourself. As Bronwyn put it, you can’t pour from an empty jug.
There is more to say about the framework, and I’ll get to it when I sit down with Peter Coroneos. For now, Bronwyn’s links and Cybermindz are below. If you want more of these conversations, the newsletter lives at marcociappelli.com.
Let’s keep thinking.
— Marco
Co-Founder ITSPmagazine & Studio C60 | Creative Director | Branding & Marketing Advisor | Personal Branding Coach | Journalist | Writer | Podcast: An Analog Brain In A Digital Age ⚠️ Beware: Pigs May Fly | 🌎 LAX🛸FLR 🌍
Marco Ciappelli is Co-Founder & CMO of ITSPmagazine, Co-Founder & Creative Director of Studio C60, Branding & Marketing Advisor, Personal Branding Coach, Journalist, Writer, and Host of An Analog Brain In A Digital Age podcast. Born in Florence, Italy, and based in Los Angeles, he explores the intersection of technology, society, storytelling, and creativity — with an analog brain, in a digital age. His on-the-ground event coverage is produced with ITSPmagazine co-founder Sean Martin under the On Location With Sean Martin And Marco Ciappelli banner.
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Bronwyn Boyle is the Chief Information Security Officer of PPRO, a London-based payments platform that connects local payment methods to global e-commerce. She brings more than two decades across cybersecurity, fraud prevention, and regulatory compliance, with previous CISO and security leadership roles at Mambu, TSB Bank, and the UK’s Open Banking implementation entity, and earlier work at IBM, Barclays, and Lloyds. Unusually for the field, she arrived through a degree in classics and philosophy, and that humanist streak runs through her advocacy. She is a UK board member of Cybermindz, the non-profit founded by Peter Coroneos in 2022 to protect the mental health of cybersecurity practitioners using the military-developed iRest protocol, and a vocal champion for neurodiversity, women in cyber, and burnout prevention.
🔗 LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/bronwynboyle | PPRO: ppro.com | Cybermindz: cybermindz.org
More from this event:
Full InfoSecurity Europe 2026 coverage: ITSPmagazine InfoSecurity Europe 2026
All ITSPmagazine event coverage: Technology & Cybersecurity Conference Coverage
TRANSCRIPT SUMMARY & QUOTES — Bronwyn Boyle | InfoSecurity Europe 2026
(Host: Marco Ciappelli — An Analog Brain In A Digital Age / On Location)
----- EPISODE SUMMARY -----
Recorded On Location at InfoSecurity Europe 2026, Marco Ciappelli sits down with Bronwyn Boyle — CISO at the payments fintech PPRO and a UK board member of Cybermindz — for a conversation about the human cost of defending the machine. Boyle, who came to security from a background in classics and philosophy, describes recognizing her own burnout only after meeting Cybermindz founder Peter Coroneos and hearing the symptoms named aloud. They talk about why the profession quietly priced exhaustion into the job description, the asymmetry that forces defenders to be right every time while an attacker needs to be right once, and the hero complex that makes practitioners fluent in system vulnerabilities yet silent about their own. Boyle explains how Cybermindz adapts iRest — a protocol the US military developed for traumatized veterans — to help cyber teams step out of permanent fight-or-flight, and makes the case that psychological resilience belongs in the security framework alongside the technical stack. Threaded through it is Marco's running question: what happens when we keep plugging our analog brains into an always-on digital world and call the strain a personal failing rather than a predictable one.
----- 3 QUOTES — BRONWYN BOYLE -----
On the heart of it:
"We can talk about vulnerabilities for hours. We can't always talk about vulnerability as it hits us, as it affects us as people."
On recognizing burnout:
"I was suffering from burnout, but I didn't know it. You can be right in the thick of it and not see the wood for the trees."
On where this has to go:
"Let's optimize our psychological stack as well as our tech stack. Wouldn't it be fantastic to see this as a standard component of your cyber resilience framework?"
----- 3 QUOTES — MARCO CIAPPELLI -----
On why he's there:
"I'm interested in the human side of technology, because ultimately we're the ones who create it, and we should be the ones who benefit from it."
On the old assumption:
"For years we took stress and burnout as part of the job description — this is what you signed up for. It shouldn't be. It doesn't have to be."
On taking care:
"We care, and we want to take care of others. But you have to take care of yourself before you can go and help everyone else."