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909Exec is the executive leadership podcast from 909Cyber, hosted by founder and CEO Den Jones, whose three-plus decades in enterprise security span Adobe, Cisco, SonicWall, and Banyan Security — where cybersecurity meets business strategy.

In episode 65, Den is joined by Rachel Vrabec, founder and CEO of Kanary, to discuss how personal data has become both a powerful asset and a serious liability in the age of AI.

Rachel traces her path from growing up a builder in Northern Wisconsin, to strategy consulting at IBM (design strategy, SAP, early enterprise Apple Watch deployments, and IoT safety modeling across Seoul, Madrid, and Tokyo), to political data science at Civis Analytics — where she sat beside the head of security while state-funded actors targeted the company's predictive models during the 2016 election. That front-row seat to data's power and risk pushed her to found Kanary: a platform that scrapes the web to map an individual's exposure, builds threat models for doxing, impersonation, and account takeover, and automates mitigation — for individuals and for organizations including the federal DOJ, major tech companies, and highly targeted nonprofits.

Den and Rachel dig into how AI accelerates both the accuracy and the danger of personal data exposure, why Kanary acts as a "personal pen tester" running popular prompts against LLMs to catch leaks, and how harmful data can be removed or aged out as models retrain. They also cover Kanary's move toward multimodal protection (images and video), why takedowns alone aren't enough, and how digital signals now plug into physical security programs.

The conversation closes with Rachel's honest take on founding a startup: the pressure of hyper-growth narratives, why "getting the right people in the right seats" is the real unlock, and how to stop carrying founder regret as baggage that slows you down.

What we cover:

Interview fraud and how 909 Shield protects hiring
Rachel's path from IBM to political data science at Civis Analytics
Gender dynamics in early tech education
Nation-state attacks on the 2016 election, witnessed firsthand
From "big data" and neural nets to today's AI branding
Why Rachel founded Kanary: data as early-warning protection, not monetization
Threat models for doxing, impersonation, account takeover
Kanary's work with the federal DOJ, tech leaders, and the National Network of Abortion Funds
Acting as a "personal pen tester" for AI chatbots and LLMs
Removing harmful data from AI models via patches and retraining
Going multimodal: images and video, not just text
Why removal alone isn't a strategy — pairing digital signals with physical security
Limits of DIY "email every data broker" approaches
Founder lessons: hiring right, rejecting hyper-growth myths, letting go of regret

Guest: Rachel Vrabec, Founder & CEO of Kanary

Host: Den Jones, Founder & CEO of 909 Cyber

Links:

909Shield: https://909shield.ai

909Cyber: https://909cyber.com

Kanary: https://www.kanary.com/

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#CyberSecurity #ExecutiveLeadership #AIPrivacy #Doxxing #Kanary #909Exec

Chapters: 00:00 Interview fraud & 909 Shield 00:48 Intro & guest setup 02:48 Childhood & early tech exposure 10:28 Joining IBM 16:39 Civis Analytics 20:54 2016 election targeting; big data to AI 29:17 Founding Kanary 34:15 AI, LLM risk & data removal 37:14 Going multimodal & physical security 42:53 Why "delete my data" doesn't work 44:01 Founder lessons & letting go of baggage