In this episode of the Security by Default Podcast, recorded at the tail end of Cybersecurity Awareness Month, host Joe Carson welcomes James McQuiggan, a cybersecurity professional with more than 25 years in IT and security.
James traces his path from Windows 98 tech support to 18 years at Siemens, where he found his real passion: educating people about cyber risk, from grade-school kids to grandparents. That passion led him to university teaching in cyber threat intelligence and six years at a large security awareness training company.
Then came a one-on-one meeting that turned out to be his director and HR. In about eight minutes, his role was gone. James and Joe, who went through his own redundancy and garden leave, compare notes on the shock, the grief that follows, and the slow road back.
James explains how he turned the experience into a talk that maps job loss onto incident response: preparation, containment, recovery and lessons learned, plus threat intelligence on your own options. He covers the practical first steps — finances, healthcare and insurance and why within the first week he spoke to around a dozen people in his network.
The conversation also covers why your next role will most likely come from your peers rather than job bulletins, how speaking about the experience became James's therapy, and how he stays current through deepfake research, the Simply Cyber community and conferences. They close on humor, with James's new joke book, A Megabyte of Jokes, co-written with Mishaal Khan.
In this episode:
Additional Links and Resources:
Megabyte of Jokes: https://a.co/d/017iWtH4
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jmcquiggan/
Website: https://jamesmcquiggan.com
Apparent Security: https://apparentsecurity.com
Simply Cyber, Daily Cyber Threat Brief on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@SimplyCyber
