Simon Says – Musings of a Technology CTO

Market leader, speaker and author in anti-malware, data security, and endpoint encryption. 3x CPO, 4x CTO, 7x SC Awards winner.

Simon Hunt is a cybersecurity product and technology leader with a track record of building, scaling, and commercializing security innovation across startups and global enterprises.

As founder and CTO of SafeBoot, Simon helped grow the company into a leader in data encryption before its acquisition by McAfee in 2007 for $350 million. Since then, he has held a series of senior leadership roles across McAfee and Intel, including CTO of Innovation, CTO of Endpoint Security, CTO of Data Protection, and CTO of Home Gateway Security. He later served as Executive Vice President of Cyber Security Innovation at Mastercard, Chief Product Officer at SecurityScorecard and Reveald, and now Chief Product Officer at Securonix.

Today, Simon is focused on the evolution of the AI-powered SOC, helping bring agentic AI, threat intelligence, and data economics into the modern SIEM market.

At Mastercard, he led major cybersecurity innovation efforts, including the RiskRecon acquisition, which expanded third-party cyber risk analytics to 100 million merchants and 25,000 banks. He also played a key role in bringing Apple Card to life, helped initiate Mastercard’s acquisition of Recorded Future, and worked with his team to prevent and recover substantial losses from cybercrime.

At McAfee, Simon led enterprise endpoint technology for seven years, with a strong focus on making anti-malware and encryption products simpler, more effective, and easier to scale. He also helped close 13 acquisitions that became the foundation of McAfee’s enterprise cybersecurity portfolio. At Intel, he founded and led the company’s smart home security strategy, which resulted in products launched at CES 2017.

Simon is known for turning strong technology into real products customers can use at scale. He has a particular talent for spotting what customers will need next and building with enough flexibility to meet the future, not just the immediate requirement. He believes the hard part of product delivery is often the last 80%: taking promising technology and shaping it into something scalable, global, and marketable.

He holds a bachelor’s degree in Marine Biology and Oceanography from UCNW Bangor, which is not the most common route into cybersecurity, but it does prove that career paths don’t always need to be linear to be effective.

Simon lives on Fleming Island, Florida, with his wife, Elle, a pitbull in the shape of a chihuahua, and far too many powertools.