Most RSAC and Black Hat conference attendees go to network and learn about emerging threats. But Danielle Lewan, Clint Howard II, and 11 long-time chief information security officers (CISOs) arrive with cameras rolling and a different agenda: turning their breach-response stories into compelling television.
Last year, Lewan launched Red Mirror Studios, an independent film studio dedicated to cybersecurity, alongside Howard, co-founder and chief creative officer. She founded the studio after working to produce a different docuseries, CISO: The Worst Job I Ever Wanted, while director of global marketing at Nagomi Security in 2025.
Now, as Red Mirror Studios founder and CEO, Lewan will release an 11-episode limited series called Declassified, in which 11 cybersecurity experts from enterprise, government, and critical infrastructure organizations will share their stories on screen. Declassified was filmed in March during the RSAC Conference in San Francisco, and the first episode aired on July 28, days before Black Hat USA 2026 kicked off in Las Vegas.
The series aims to promote candid conversations for CISOs dealing with high-pressure breaches, internal failures, and personal struggles. While the studio provides a place for CISOs to share vulnerable stories, the series also raises security awareness for individuals who encounter cyberattacks daily, whether they receive breach notifications or work in affected organizations. Cyberattacks make headlines, but transparency is often limited. By sharing real experiences, the series aims to help people understand why security fundamentals, like strong passwords, matter.
Meet the Directors
Risk is a constant in cybersecurity, particularly for CISOs who spend their careers managing it, mitigating it, or falling victim to it. Lewan knows the word well because it has defined her film journey, too.
When Lewan and Howard’s first project, CISO: The Worst Job I Ever Wanted, didn’t go quite as they expected, they realized that if they wanted to change cybersecurity through stories, they had to take an independent route, Lewan tells Dark Reading. Producing a docuseries as a vendor had expectations that did not align with how they wanted to move forward. Corporate politics clashed with their vision for a docuseries. For example, the lead venture capitalists (VCs) funding CISO: The Worst Job I Ever Wanted wanted to omit certain CISOs and change the title after Lewan had completed market research and validation. They feared it would deter CISOs from entering the role, she explains.
“Instead of following through with a docuseries that would honestly reflect the reality of the job, they decided it was too much of a risk to their bottom line,” Lewan explains. “Money ruled.”
Refusing VCs who control a startup’s funding is an employment death sentence, she adds, stating how she refused.
Lewan refers to herself and Howard as two stubborn storytellers who were never afraid to fail. In fact, they consider themselves professional failures, which she believes makes them relatable to every cybersecurity leader they interview. When they failed with CISO: The Worst Job I Ever Wanted, they took matters into their own hands to find a compatible VC who shared the same passion for candid stories.
That commonality builds trust between the founders and the subjects sitting behind the lens. If people don’t trust you, you don’t get to have the conversation, much less get the truth, Howard tells Dark Reading. He applauds Lewan for spending her career building that trust with security leaders.
“I get to borrow against it and bring my experience to the stories that are usually redacted, confidential, or only ever told in boardrooms,” Howard says. “That’s a rare position in any industry.”
Most of what gets made within cybersecurity is a product or is promotional, he says. Declassified features people on camera who have never talked about their work publicly, he adds.
Meet the Characters
One of those people is Tyson Kopczynski, partner at White Rabbit VC. Like many of the Declassified participants, Kopczynski credits Lewan’s determination and ability to bring people together for getting him on board.
Kopczynski is an investor now, but he previously worked as a CISO, first in finance and then in healthcare. CISO stress is constant, and transitioning from a well-funded industry like finance to healthcare, which significantly lacks resources while providing services for a vulnerable population, made it unbearable.
The US healthcare system is “highly dysfunctional,” Kopczynski says. “They’re also way behind from a cyber perspective, and they’re struggling.”
Attack fallout can lead to deadly consequences, but his job was to move the ball forward as much as possible, he explains. The paradox weighed on him. The expectations and the liability risk were too high — a problem many CISOs face.
And that’s when Kopczynski hit his breaking point and left the industry.
By becoming involved with Red Mirror, Kopczynski hopes to overcome some of the challenges that CISOs face, particularly the lack of transparency around what they do all day and often into the night. Because so much of what they do is confidential, support and a general definition of the CISO role is limited, he explains.
Cybersecurity professionals don’t do a good job of explaining their field, Kopczynski adds. He hopes the new series will paint the industry in a more relatable way, not as mysterious as Hollywood makes it look, with hackers typing furiously in dark rooms.
“We talk in our own language typically,” he says. “We’re not good at telling stories because either we can’t tell them because we’re not allowed to or we don’t have the language to speak in those terms. But that’s also a detriment because people don’t know what we do.”
Hear the Stories
Finding a platform for CISOs to share their stories is one reason Chainguard field CISO John Sapp Jr. signed on as well. He and Kopczynski appear in the first Declassified episode.
Aspects of the role, including the long hours and sensitive material, are stressful for CISOs and their families alike. Sapp says he was happy to have the opportunity to explain that in-depth and how the isolation affected him. Pressure and communication barriers even led to his divorce, he says.
“I think it’s a healing opportunity because we had to carry this stuff bottled up inside of us for so long,” Sapp tells Dark Reading. “We go home, and we have spouses and others in our lives who we want to talk to, but there are certain things we can’t say.”
Even if they want to tell their stories, potential blowback from employers is one concern that keeps CISOs silent, he says. They’re afraid of what may come back on them, but they’re also worried that sharing their frontline experiences could prevent them from getting their next opportunity in a career that didn’t even exist 25 years ago.
In the docuseries, Sapp did discuss a hack that happened while working for a global manufacturing medical device company with an office located in Brazil. The bank the company worked with was adding multifactor authentication to its security posture when threat actors used the opportunity to conduct a social engineering campaign. In one moment, a seemingly legitimate bank call turned into $2 million stolen.
“There is an importance to what we do because if we don’t do it, society as a whole will be impacted,” he says. “Cyber terrorism is real, and we are the generals that are responsible for defense.”
Read the Reviews
Burnout isn’t exclusive to the CISO role. The cybersecurity space is full of people dealing with the turmoil that leads towards burnout, says Bryson Byrd, cybersecurity adviser for Huntress and CISO and co-founder of Servitium Cyber. To that end, Byrd agrees with the goals of the new Red Mirror Studios project, noting that any medium that helps raise awareness of the problem and let professionals know they’re not alone is a good thing. As a professor and mentor at the University of Texas, he champions a human-centric approach to cybersecurity.
When pillars of the community are willing to be vulnerable and share their struggles with “all of this anxiety, burnout, and depression stuff,” it makes the rest feel both seen and not alone in this fight, Byrd tells Dark Reading.
“Just being able to know, ‘Hey, this is another human being going through challenges, and I’m going through them too,’ makes you feel less alone,” he says. “So I think that’s huge.”
