Ep22 Antonio Pagano—Phishing, AI Scams, and the Ever-Intensifying Cybersecurity War
Episode Summary
Antonio Pagano, CTO and co-founder of Symbol Security and founder of Wano, discusses the evolving cybersecurity landscape with a focus on phishing attacks enhanced by AI. He shares how AI enables more sophisticated social engineering, domain spoofing, and grammatically perfect phishing emails that bypass traditional detection methods. Pagano also covers his journey building two companies—a Colombian software consultancy and a cybersecurity SaaS platform—while maintaining work-life balance and learning from sports and continuous education.
Key Quotes
"AI has eliminated one of the key phishing indicators—poor grammar—by enabling attackers to craft perfectly natural messages in any language, making social engineering attacks significantly more sophisticated."
"A client caught a payment fraud attempt when attackers changed wire instructions mid-thread using a domain that differed by just one letter, detected only because Symbol Security had flagged the domain variation an hour before the attack."
"Pagano maintains strict work-life boundaries, leaving the office by 5-6 PM and reading to his children every night, demonstrating that founders can build multiple successful companies without sacrificing family time."
Transcript
# Tales From The Sky Lounge - Cleaned Transcript (Chunk 1/3)
Hi, welcome to Tales From The Sky Lounge, it's a podcast about business consulting and venture investing. We get out there in the world, we talk to people who are making it happen, and we get their stories. If you could like and subscribe, it really helps us get our message out.
So today in the Sky Lounge, Antonio Pagano. Hey Antonio, good to have you here. Thanks for having me. Well, Antonio, who are you and what are you working on these days?
Yeah, well a bunch of things. I'm the founder of a consultancy company, a software development consultancy company in Colombia, which has the name Wano. What we do there is we accelerate companies through technology and we help them maximize the potential for their users. And on the side, not so on the side but taking a lot of my time, most of my time, I'm the CTO and co-founder of Symbol Security. Symbol Security is a software as a service platform that provides cyber security awareness to multiple companies. So yes, at this moment I'm dealing with these two big things, and I enjoy it by the way.
Very cool. Well, a lot to unpack, and you're in Boston if I remember right?
Want to go deeper?
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