# Pete Cordero

Pete Cordero creates cybersecurity leadership education for executives, with a focus on helping leaders question their CISOs about cyber threats, preparedness, and governance. His 2025 program update covers topics including nation-state threats, ransomware, and security frameworks.

- Profile: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/creators/pete-cordero/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pete-cordero-fbiretired-cpa-cissp
- Topics: leadership, cybersecurity
- Based on 17 dated posts, latest 2026-08-27

## Summary

Pete Cordero is most useful for executive cybersecurity education on threats and CISO governance.

- Best for: A cybersecurity advisory firm wanting executive briefings on nation-state threats and CISO governance.
- Not for: Consumer privacy campaigns or general security awareness for everyday home users.
- Check first: Ask for session recordings, audience data, fees, booking, and deliverables before contacting them.

### Takeaways

- Cyber risk is a leadership problem, not just a security team problem.
- Turn a broad worry into a specific question for the CISO.
- A framework counts only if leadership monitors it and funds it.

## Main ideas

- **Cyber risk is a leadership problem, not just a security team problem**: Cordero's material is written for executives, corporate directors, audit committees, and risk owners—not security practitioners. Senior leaders in critical infrastructure need enough grounding in current threats to challenge their CISOs, while security leaders should bring the material to executives rather than keep it within the security function. Without informed questions, oversight becomes a formality.
- **Turn a broad worry into a specific question for the CISO**: Cordero uses numbered questions for executives, following each broad concern with sub-questions that demand evidence, not reassurance. Leaders who work through them can distinguish a program that operates from one that exists on paper—and make a concrete request instead of simply expressing concern.
- **A framework counts only if leadership monitors it and funds it**: Cordero puts framework adoption at the start of the update, framing it as an oversight question, not a technical one. Executives should know which framework the CISO uses, how it works, and whether leadership monitors it. Cordero singles out NIST CSF 2.0 and its six functions—Governance, Identify, Protect, Detect, Respond, Recover—and calls for executive management to implement and regularly monitor all six. The same principle applies to resources: leadership should provide what the CISO needs across personnel, operations, and technology.
- **Name the threat actors and tie them to the audience's own systems**: Cordero names China-linked APT groups Volt Typhoon and Salt Typhoon, describes intrusions into U.S. energy, water and wastewater, transportation, and communications sectors, and gives audiences a sense of the scale of the infrastructure they oversee. Cordero also expects CISOs to track nation-state tactics and test for them through regular threat hunts and government mitigation guidance.
- **Recovery readiness and everyday controls are where executives can act**: Beyond threat awareness, Cordero pushes executives toward verifiable decisions: whether the organization has simulated a ransomware attack with senior leadership or the board in the room; whether backups exist and are tested at intervals leadership has approved; and whether the organization has accepted a stated level of data loss if recovery fails. On the operational side, Cordero points to business email compromise, internal controls to prevent unauthorized wire transfers, the CISO's ability to quickly reach the nearest FBI field office and the IC3 Recovery Asset Team after a bad transfer, and whether mobile, application, and wireless access are protected by a secured enterprise mobility management suite that leadership has been briefed on.
- **Deliver continuing education in short, timestamped segments for busy leaders**: Cordero treats format as part of the teaching. The 2025 update was recorded as one long video, then split into three short parts for leaders to watch at their leisure. A table of contents appears in the opening minute, and each part is paired with relevant questions. The update is continuing education for people who have completed Cordero's eight-hour program, though it was published more widely.

## Work to read

- [2025 Hacking The Cyber Threat Update: Overview and CISA Critical Infrastructure Stats](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/pete-cordero-fbiretired-cpa-cissp_todays-nation-state-actor-cyber-threats-activity-7337972189712826370-qbCd)
- [Why Cordero Shared the 2025 Update: Spain and Portugal Outage plus Volt and Salt Typhoon](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/pete-cordero-fbiretired-cpa-cissp_i-have-decided-to-share-my-2025-update-for-activity-7325968909973528576-2lS3)
- [Part II: Ransomware, Breach Costs, and Executive Questions 1–3](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/pete-cordero-fbiretired-cpa-cissp_part-ii-of-the-2025-hacking-the-cyber-threat-activity-7337979717410615298-ZT9L)
- [Part III: Volt Typhoon, Salt Typhoon, and Executive Questions 4–7](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/pete-cordero-fbiretired-cpa-cissp_part-iii-of-the-2025-hacking-the-cyber-threat-activity-7337980298908839938-_UZw)
- [A Cybersecurity Message for Communications Sector Leaders](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/pete-cordero-fbiretired-cpa-cissp_a-cybersecurity-message-for-our-leaders-and-activity-7323875283550302208-Ghqz)

## Brand relationships

- **Hacking The Cyber Threat** (owned_business)

## Partnerships

The posts here contain no documented sponsorship, brand-partnership, or paid-collaboration offer. What Cordero publishes is Cordero's own cybersecurity leadership education: a 31-minute 2025 program update hosted on YouTube and split into three shorter LinkedIn videos (11, 8, and 12 minutes), plus question sets that senior executives can put to their CISOs. Those posts name no rate, no package, no partner terms, and no outreach address, so a buyer cannot build a partnership plan from them. Whether Cordero accepts sponsored work at all is not established either way by the posts here; the honest reading is that no offer is documented here, not that none exists. Two gaps matter for a campaign. First, there is no published inquiry route, so the contact path for commissioning an executive briefing or workshop series is unverified. Second, there is no stated format — sponsored video, paid keynote, branded series, or advisory retainer — that a buyer could compare against budget. An engagement may still be possible, but the terms would have to be established directly rather than sourced from a published page. This section should be revisited if a sponsorship page, media kit, or booking contact is found.

## Alternatives

- Shawn Edwards: Choose Edwards when the client is a communications provider seeking a briefing from an operator's seat rather than a teaching program. Edwards's posts describe building a provider's compliance and government-security programs around CMMC, NIST 800-171, FedRAMP, DFARS, SOC 2, ISO 27001, and PCI DSS, and serving as a director on the C2 ISAC board, where carriers including AT&T, Charter, Comcast, Cox, Lumen, T-Mobile, Verizon, and Zayo share indicators, vulnerabilities, and tactics in a trusted setting. Edwards is a better match when the value lies in how a carrier assembles and defends those programs and how sector information sharing works in practice.
- Sandra Roberts, CSM, CySA: Choose Roberts when the briefing centers on the CISO's relationship with the board and long-horizon planning rather than specific adversaries. Roberts's posts argue that CISOs must show how security spending supports business goals, that board and executive continuity can outlast an average CISO tenure of under three years, and that organizations need roadmaps with timelines, resource plans, and vendor coordination that survive leadership changes. One post addresses quantum readiness and the 'harvest now, decrypt later' pattern, in which encrypted data is collected now to be decrypted once quantum capability arrives. That framing suits CISO and board audiences working on governance roadmaps and post-quantum migration planning.
- Stephanie Atkinson, MBA: Choose Atkinson when the audience is operational technology and state or local utility operators, or when the buyer wants an industry-analyst view across connected technology markets. The reviewed commentary post argues that programmable logic controllers, modems, routers, smart cameras, servers, and gateways in water, wastewater, and grid systems are connected without adequate protection. It points to CISA's Cross-Sector Cybersecurity Performance Goals, the Joint Cyber Defense Collaborative, NIST CSF, and NIST SP 800-82 for isolating OT edge devices from corporate IT networks. It also identifies a responsibility gap: national-security assets are often owned by small, budget-limited local entities without skilled security staff. That makes Atkinson a strong fit for briefings aimed at utility and industrial operators rather than enterprise CISOs.

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AI-assisted summary of public posts. Audience demographics are not available. Engagement appears only where we checked recent posts. Method: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/methodology/