R ed Mirror Studios CEO and Co-Founder Danielle Lewan said Declassified grew out of two careers that, at first glance, appeared very different. Having begun as an investigative journalist before moving into enterprise security, she found herself driven by the same question throughout both professions: what really happens behind the headlines?
Rather than focusing on official statements or incident reports, Lewan said she had always been interested in understanding how people navigated their most difficult moments. That curiosity followed her into cybersecurity, where security leaders became the people she called whenever organisations experienced major incidents.
Danielle Lewan, CEO and Co- Founder, Red Mirror Studios
She explained that while reports documented what had happened, they rarely captured how leaders made decisions under pressure, how they balanced uncertainty or how experience and instinct shaped the outcome. Those conversations ultimately became the foundation of Red Mirror Studios and its first docuseries series, Declassified.
John Sapp Jr., Field CISO at Chainguard
Behind every major cyber-incident is a story that never makes it into the official report. Declassified, a docuseries from Red Mirror Studios, aims to change that by giving experienced cybersecurity leaders the opportunity to share the personal experiences and lessons that have shaped their careers. Red Mirror Studios CEO and Co-Founder Danielle Lewan and John Sapp Jr., Field CISO at Chainguard and one of the docuseries’ contributors, exclusively tell Intelligent CISO editor Mark Bowen why preserving those stories could help build a more resilient generation of security leaders.
Lewan described the project as a peer-to-peer storytelling platform designed to preserve knowledge that would otherwise disappear. The 11 security leaders featured in the series represent some of the most senior practitioners in cybersecurity, all of whom broke a decades-long tradition of public silence to sit down for on-camera interviews. Filmed during the RSA Conference, episode 1 is scheduled for release this summer ahead of Black Hat, the docuseries captures a generation of industry veterans whose experiences have never been properly documented.
One of the strongest themes to emerge surprised even her. Despite leading some of the world’ s largest security programmes, almost none of the participants had originally intended to build careers in cybersecurity.
Some had been plumbers, bakers or college dropouts, while others had been pursuing entirely different careers before finding their way into the profession.
For Lewan, that reflected the reality of an industry that is still relatively young and built by people
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