Ep. 183 - Security Awareness Series - I Promise You That's Not Amazon On The Phone with Kevin Gowen

Today our guest joining us is Kevin Gowen. Kevin serves as Chief Information Security Officer for Synovus and is responsible for information and cyber security, physical security, business continuity, fraud, and financial crimes. He was named Chief Information Security Officer in 2015. Gowen earned Bachelor's and Master's degrees in Mechanical Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology. He was a recipient of the James H. Blanchard Leadership award and was named Tech Exec Networks' Information Security Executive of the Year in May 2022. Gowen is an alumnus of Leadership Columbus and serves as a board member of the National Technology Security Coalition along with serving on multiple advisory boards and in industry group leadership roles. [Oct 17th, 2022]

00:00 – Intro

00:56 – Intro Links:

• Social-Engineer.com 
• Managed Voice Phishing 

• Managed Email Phishing 
• Adversarial Simulations -
• Social-Engineer channel on SLACK 
• CLUTCH 
• innocentlivesfoundation.org 

03:55 – Kevin Gowen Intro

05:55 – What made you want to go into InfoSec?

06:56 – Managing Risk with teams of 10,000+

08:24 – How do you stay in front of the next attack?

10:15 – Top 3 Talking Points to assure the stakeholders

11:27 – How do you educate the customer?

13:04 – The "push" during Cybersecurity Awareness Month

14:23 – That's not Amazon!

15:55 – How are you attracting and retaining talent during this employee drought?

20:23 – Poaching vs Developing

22:46 – Communicating the need for diversity down the ladder

24:25 – Cross-industry and Inter-department hiring

26:24 – If I knew then...

28:41 – Defining our "true" critical assets

30:03 – Be willing to be evaluated

32:32 – Who helped get you to where you are today?

• Father
• IBM Manager
• Allen Gula, Jr

34:47 – Find Kevin Gowen online

• LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/kevin-gowen

35:59 – Book Recommendations

• The Leadership Challenge – Barry Posner
• The Founders Mentality – James Allen & Chris Zook
• Better Great Than Never – Lindsay Dare Shoop

39:28 – Wrap Up

40:13 – Outro

• www.social-engineer.com
• www.innocentlivesfoundation.org