Lisa Ventura
Most breaches do not come through the firewall. They come through a tired employee, a shared password, a click on a convincing email, a process that nobody reviewed. Boards have spent a decade buying technology, and the human layer is still where attackers walk in.
Lisa Ventura MBE is a cyber security awareness and culture specialist who helps organisations close the human gap that technology alone cannot fix.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Lisa Ventura
- An MBE-recognised authority on the cultural and behavioural side of cyber security, the area boards now name as their largest residual exposure once tooling is in place.
- Founder of Cyber Security Unity, a global community of practitioners, which gives her live cross-industry visibility into what is actually working against social engineering, phishing, and insider risk.
- A practical voice on neurodiversity and inclusion in cyber security hiring, useful for organisations trying to widen a tight talent pool without diluting capability.
- Speaks to the human cost inside security teams, burnout, imposter syndrome, and workplace harassment that quietly degrade incident response and retention.
- Author of “The Rise of the Cyber Women” series, with credibility built through the practitioner community rather than vendor marketing.
Biography highlights
- MBE, King Charles III Birthday Honours 2023, for services to cyber security and diversity and inclusion.
- Founder, Cyber Security Unity (formerly the UK Cyber Security Association).
- Author of “The Rise of the Cyber Women: Volume One and Two” and “The Varied Origins of the Cyber Men: Volume One”.
- Winner, “Outstanding Contribution to Cyber Security”, SC Magazine Awards Europe.
- Winner, “Cyber Security Personality of the Year”, UK Cyber Security Awards.
- Listed on IT Security Guru’s Most Inspiring Women in Cyber Security (2022, 2024), We Are Tech Women Top 100, and IFSEC Global Influencers.
Biography
The cybersecurity industry sells controls. What has been slower to sell is culture. Most organisations now have endpoint protection, SIEM platforms, and incident response retainers. The breaches that still happen are almost always human, a click, a credential, a process gap, an exhausted analyst missing a signal at 3 am. That is the territory Lisa Ventura works in.
She founded Cyber Security Unity, a global community organisation for cyber security practitioners, on the view that the industry remains fragmented and works in silos. Her consulting work with security leadership teams focuses on collaboration, awareness, and the cultural conditions that determine whether a security programme actually changes behaviour or just produces compliance evidence.
Her books “The Rise of the Cyber Women,” Volumes One and Two, and “The Varied Origins of the Cyber Men,” Volume One, profile the routes practitioners take into the industry. The point is practical, not celebratory. Cybersecurity has a hiring problem, and one of the cheapest ways to widen the pipeline is to take neurodiversity and non-linear career paths seriously. Ventura is openly autistic and uses that experience to make the business case to CISOs and HR teams who are losing talent they could keep.
In 2023, she received an MBE for services to cyber security and to diversity and inclusion. The recognition is useful shorthand for what she actually does in a room: she translates cybersecurity from a technical risk into a leadership and culture problem, and she has the practitioner network to back the argument.
Key speaking topics
- Cyber security awareness and culture change
- The human layer of cyber risk
- Neurodiversity in cybersecurity hiring and retention
- Social engineering and phishing defence
- Burnout, stress, and mental health in security teams
- Cloud security collaboration
- Women and underrepresented groups in cybersecurity careers
Ideal for
- CISOs and security leadership teams running awareness programmes that have stalled
- CHROs and talent leads trying to widen the cybersecurity hiring pipeline
- Boards and audit committees treating cyber as a culture and conduct issue, not only a control issue
- Industry conferences and corporate events on cybersecurity, technology workforce, and inclusion
Audience outcomes
- A clearer view of where human factors sit inside the organisation’s actual cyber risk picture
- Specific, applicable approaches to awareness training that move behaviour, not just completion rates
- A practical case for treating neurodiversity as a hiring advantage in security teams
- Recognition of the burnout patterns that quietly damage incident response capability
- Cross-sector reference points from a practitioner community rather than a vendor stack
Talks
A working session on why the cloud security industry remains fragmented and what global collaboration between vendors, practitioners, and customers could change.
Key takeaways:
- The principal cloud security threats organisations are seeing in practice
- Where industry silos leave organisations exposed and how to close them
- What worldwide collaboration in cloud security looks like in operational terms