RSA Conference 2025
Risk at the speed of broadcast
"Downtime is measured in seconds when 100 million people are watching."
$ whois tomas-maldonado $
Joined the information security team at a global investment bank. Cut my teeth on identity, access, and the hard parts of doing security inside a regulated giant.
The financial crisis reshaped how I thought about risk — not as a checklist but as a living system that fails in ways nobody modeled.
Helped lead enterprise information security at one of the largest banks on the planet. Learned that great security at scale is mostly great operations.
Began serving on advisory boards for security startups and industry consortia — translating between practitioners, founders, and regulators.
Joined the National Football League as Chief Information Security Officer. New industry, same first principles: protect the people, the data, the live event.
Ran a season unlike any other — broadcast operations, distributed workforce, and a threat surface that doubled overnight.
Led security operations for the most-watched broadcast of the year. Months of planning compressed into one Sunday.
Cybersecurity for live NFL games on three continents. Different jurisdictions, different telecom stacks, same standard.
Building the next chapter of the league's security program — and mentoring the people who'll run it after me.
"Downtime is measured in seconds when 100 million people are watching."
"A 17-week season forces your program to operate like a distributed system."
"Coach the people. The program follows."
"Security leadership is a translation job."
Three things I tell every new analyst on day one: 1. Curiosity beats credentials. Always. 2. Write things down. Future-you will thank present-you. 3. Be the person on the team who's calm at 2am. That's the job.
I've never regretted hiring someone curious. I've often regretted hiring someone who only had the right letters after their name. Hire for character. Train the rest.
If your security program only works when the senior people are awake, you don't have a program. You have a personality. Build the runbook. Trust the team. Go to sleep.
Every Sunday is a tabletop exercise that grades itself in real time. The score is on the scoreboard. The lessons are in the postmortem.