Everyone wants to
sell you something.
Almost nobody wants
to help you think.
If you run security, you already know the feeling. A decision you cannot afford to get wrong, a diary full of people with something to sell, and a very short list of people you would actually ring for the truth. Signal exists to make that list longer.
It is a lonely job, and the industry made it lonelier.
- Why does it feel like this?
- Almost everyone who wants your attention is selling. The good advice and the sales pitch arrive in the same inbox, in the same tone, and telling them apart is now part of the job.
- So where did the honesty go?
- Into private conversations, between practitioners who already know one another. Nobody says the difficult part on a stage. They say it afterwards, to someone they trust.
- What does that leave?
- Trust as the scarcest thing in cybersecurity. It cannot be bought, and a saturated channel cannot manufacture it. It only gets built in small rooms, slowly, by people who keep their word.
So Signal built the rooms. Not as a plan for next year, but as something already running.
Founded by someone still doing the job.
Signal was founded by Vin Marc Maguire, a CISO and Fractional CISO. He started Sec-1, one of the UK's early specialist penetration testing consultancies, later acquired by Claranet. AppCheck came out of Sec-1, and he contributed to the early development of CREST.
He went on to lead security as CISO in a £400 million utilities organisation, building the foundations that supported its growth beyond £1 billion, and has since carried out more than a hundred cybersecurity maturity assessments while continuing to advise as a Fractional CISO.
Organisations rarely struggled because they lacked technology. They struggled because trusted conversations were too difficult to find.
Signal was created to solve that problem. Not by an events business, not by an agency, and not by anyone with a list to sell.
By the numbers.
The community itself is growing steadily, mostly by one person telling another to come. You do not have to take any of it on trust: every conversation is published in full.
Go and listen. Then decide.
You will not find testimonials on this site. Signal Sessions run under the Chatham House Rule, so what people say in the room stays in the room. Quoting attendees to sell places in the next one would undo the only thing that makes it work.
What we can do is publish everything else. More than thirty Signal Vox conversations are out there in full, free and unedited, with real security leaders talking about what is changing, what is breaking and what actually matters. That is a better test of whether this is for you than any quotation we could print.
Vox is one of four ways in. They are not the same thing, and it is worth knowing which one you want.
Four ways in, and they are not the same thing.
Hear how other security leaders made the call.
Public, published and free to anyone. Long form conversations with CISOs, builders and practitioners about the decisions, the scars and the lessons that shape modern security. New conversations weekly, and nothing sits behind a form.
About Signal Vox Signal SessionsSit in the room with them.
Private, in person and invitation led. Small executive gatherings under the Chatham House Rule, where the difficult part of the story gets told because nobody can attribute it afterwards. Four held so far, four more planned.
About Signal Sessions Signal Community Coming soonAsk your own question, and get an honest answer.
Continuous and online, in between the rooms. A place to put the problem you are living with in front of people who have already been through it, to mentor the ones coming up behind you, and to keep the relationships going. Opening in small groups.
About the community Signal PartnerCastFor the companies building the technology.
Partner supported and clearly labelled, which is what separates it from Vox. A selected organisation explores a real cybersecurity challenge in conversation, contributes something useful, and introduces their thinking without resorting to promotion.
About PartnerCast
Signal Sessions · London
Small enough that everyone speaks.
Sessions are sized for conversation rather than for an audience. Everyone contributes, nobody performs, and the agenda comes from the people present. Growing the room would be easy, and it would ruin it.
Three of those four are for practitioners. The fourth is how companies take part without buying their way in.
Become part of the conversation.
Great technology rarely fails because it is not good enough. It fails because the right conversations never happen. Partners take part in Signal as contributors, not as advertisers.
Share what you know
Thoughtful conversations with respected industry voices, about the problems you understand best.
Explain what you solve
Why those problems matter, in a discussion built to teach people something rather than to sell to them.
Help the community grow
Support a professional home for security leaders, practitioners and people entering the field.
Partners support the growth of Signal. They do not influence the conversations, choose the guests or set the agenda. That independence is fundamental to the trust the community places in Signal, and it is not negotiable.
Signal connects cybersecurity professionals through conversations that matter.
It is being built now, in the open, by the people in it. Nobody here bought their place. They earned it by being useful to someone else in the room, and that is the only currency this community has ever accepted.
Signal is still small enough that the people joining now will shape what it becomes. That will not be true for much longer.