Your Brain Was Built for Threats That End — a Cyberattack Never Does | Marco Ciappelli Interviews Peter Coroneos founder of CyberMindz.org at Infosecurity Europe 2026

PODCAST EPISODE | An Analog Brain In A Digital Age With Marco Ciappelli — On Location at Infosecurity Europe 2026 Our brains evolved to handle threats that show up and then leave. A cyberattack never leaves. Peter Coroneos, founder of Cybermindz, joins me on the last day of Infosecurity Europe 2026 to talk about what a never-ending digital siege does to the human nervous system — and how you teach it to stand down. 📺 Watch | 🎤 Listen | marcociappelli.com A branch cracks behind you in the dark. Your heart slams, your body floods, you spin around — and there's nothing there. A minute later you're calm again. That machinery, the jolt of fear and then the all-clear that follows it, is millions of years old, and it works for one reason: the threat shows up, and then it leaves. Peter Coroneos has spent a long time thinking about what happens to that machinery when the threat never leaves. He's the founder of Cybermindz, a non-profit that does something the security industry has been slow to take seriously: it treats the mental state of the people defending the network as part of the network's resilience. I'd already heard about the work from Bronwyn Boyle earlier this week. Peter is the person who started it. His background was in neuroscience before it was in cyber, and he frames the problem like this. We evolved to handle physical threats — a predator, a rival, something you can see. It arrives, your system escalates, you deal with it, and then your nervous system gets the signal that you're safe and powers down. A cyberattack sends no such signal. The attacker is invisible. The attack has no obvious end. So the body never gets the all-clear, and it stays switched on, week after week, year after year. An ancient brain, built for the savannah, locked inside a digital siege that never lifts. That is the show I make, in a single image. An analog brain, in a digital age, paying a price nobody designed it to pay. The price is real. Peter is careful to say the goal isn't to remove stress, because that's the job and it isn't going anywhere — less than ever, with attackers now wielding AI. The danger is stress that never meets recovery. That's what curdles into burnout, and burnout shows up late; by the time you can name it, you're already deep in it. When those people leave, and after a bad incident many of them do, they take something with them that was never written down. The real knowledge in a security team lives in human heads. It walks out the door wearing a coat. What Cybermindz teaches is, in Peter's words, a manual override switch — a protocol called iRest, born in trauma therapy for soldiers, that lets a person consciously bring their own system back down. Slower brainwaves, lower cortisol, out of fight-or-flight and into something like safety. The numbers aren't soft: better sleep in more than half of cases, a quarter less stress, a 74% drop in the most critical burnout cases. He doesn't pitch it as wellness. He pitches it as risk. You can't mitigate what you can't measure, and a team running on empty is a control that is quietly failing. We built a digital world that moves at a speed our biology can't match, and now we teach the body, by hand, to do the one thing the old environment did for free: tell us the danger has passed. The override is brilliant. It is also an admission. We made a place with no all-clear, so now we have to manufacture the all-clear ourselves. Stress is unavoidable, Peter told me, but suffering is optional. I believe that. I'd only add a question to it. If the system you built needs the people inside it to constantly talk their own nervous systems down from a threat that never ends, is the problem really in them? Let's keep thinking. Peter's work is at cybermindz.org. And for more conversations like this one, subscribe to the newsletter at marcociappelli.com. — Marco Co-Founder ITSPmagazine & Studio C60 | Creative Director | Branding & Marketing Advisor | Personal Branding Coach | Journalist | Writer | Podcast: An Analog Brain In A Digital Age ⚠️ Beware: Pigs May Fly | 🌎 LAX🛸FLR 🌍 More from our Infosecurity Europe 2026 coverage:Infosecurity Europe 2026 event coverageTechnology and cybersecurity conference coverage About Marco Marco Ciappelli is Co-Founder & CMO of ITSPmagazine, Co-Founder & Creative Director of Studio C60, Branding