Fifty to Watch in 2025: People Shaping Cyber

At a time when AI dominates every security conversation—whether as a threat, a defense, or an existential question—our team at TAG thought it might be refreshing to shift the focus back to something a little more . . . well, human.

Yes, this volume is about people. Not algorithms, not robots, not machine-learning models pretending to be sentient—but actual individuals whose expertise, power, and even malevolence will shape the cybersecurity landscape in 2025.

Lisa Kaplan - Alethea

Combatting Online Influence Operations

Lisa Kaplan, the founder and CEO of Alethea, is a visionary leader in the field of digital and enterprise risk management, leading how security is incorporated across the C-Suite of the Fortune 1000. Their proprietary technology, Artemis, is the market leading solution relied upon by Fortune 1000 companies across retail, CPG, financial services, and insurance, among others. Alethea’s technology is redefining how organizations identify emerging risk signals to detect, assess, and mitigate foreign influence operations, coordinated disinformation and misinformation campaigns, and perception hacks. Kaplan’s expertise and ability to anticipate the evolving needs of the industry have positioned Alethea at the forefront of a new era of combatting the increasingly complex adversary behavior targeting businesses and organizations across both the public and private sector.

On the forefront of the security AI revolution, Alethea’s proprietary machine learning models are designed to provide actionable intelligence to understand and respond to online threats. Alethea’s cutting-edge technology, developed by domain experts, gets at unique data sets to automate the detection and assessment of online risks to detect emerging threat actors, behaviors, and coordinated activity in the digital spaces where threats originate.

At a time when businesses, economies, and governments are increasingly vulnerable to foreign influence operations, Kaplan and her team have exposed and attributed novel Chinese and Russian IO campaigns, including those directly targeting private industries. Her efforts will be pivotal to fostering a more secure information environment, building corporate and industry security resilience, and preserving institutional credibility.