There were hundreds of people attending ThreatLocker’s Zero Trust World event in Orlando, Florida, last week, and the reasons for being there are as diverse as the crowd.
For some, it’s a chance to network with peers at a restaurant bar or on the show floor. For others, particularly the well-represented MSP crowd, it’s about seeing what ThreatLocker is up to next, how its product stack is evolving, and being able to communicate that to their own customers.
And no doubt for some, it’s an excuse to spend a few days at a resort with a wealth of pools, a rolling green golf course and put it on the company card.
For many, it’s probably a mix of all three.
But for Danny Jenkins, ThreatLocker’s CEO and co-founder, the mission is simple: protecting businesses and their data from an evolving world of criminal threats.
Jenkins has been in the cyber security business since 1997 and formed ThreatLocker with Sami Jenkins in 2017. At the event’s opening keynote, he tells a story that is no doubt well-worn, but nonetheless appropriate.
Many years ago, he was called in to support an Australian company’s recovery attempts after falling victim to a ransomware attack, and the incident revealed the stakes for what ThreatLocker was fighting to protect.
“Out of every other piece of malware I’ve dealt with before … I’ve never seen a piece of malware that could bring a 60-year-old man to tears,” Jenkins said.
“This man was losing his business because someone opened an email they shouldn’t have.”
Jenkins is clearly a driven man. When I first met him face-to-face, he was on the show floor, rushing from one clutch of customers to another. About 20 minutes later, I sat down with him in a room surrounded by teams of his developers and threat intelligence people, transplanted to the event to keep on top of the company’s work as the convention rushed on around them.
On this occasion, Jenkins wants to talk about conflict in the Middle East and how the activity we saw in the lead-up to, during, and after last year’s 12-day war against Iran would signpost how the conflict currently unfolding in the region.
“There’s a very short exchange of missiles, and after that – within weeks and then months – there was a large increase of state-sponsored attacks on US companies,” Jenkins said.
But government agencies, Jenkins explained, are pretty locked down. Not as locked down as they could be, he noted, but secure enough to be a very difficult target.
Where these hackers tend to be more successful, however, is going after critical infrastructure.
“I don’t mean just electricity grids,” Jenkins said, “but things like hospitals. Local cities are big, big targets, because these are very, very soft targets, very easy to get into. And this can cause chaos and disruption.”
But while the threat of nation-state and hacktivist operators is clearly front of mind for Jenkins, so is ThreatLocker’s core business of protecting companies from ransomware and data exfiltration.
“The mission … We know you cannot detect every piece of bad behaviour in the world – so how do we change security without upsetting the company, the user, the business?” he said.
The mission is to make zero trust easy – easy to implement, easy for users to work with, and particularly hard for hackers to work around any defences in place.
“We want to help you get to a point where your users can’t be hacked … But not interfere with how they do their work,” Jenkins said.
Hands-on for hackers
Zero Trust World is as much about education as it is about product announcements and sharing floor space with the event’s sponsors.
While there was a huge main stage, with everything from interviews with Apollo program legend Gene Kranz (whose quote during the Apollo 13 mission, “Failure is not an option,” was the motto for the event), to keynotes from threat specialists and a closing talk by Adam Savage of Mythbusters fame, there were learning opportunities as well.
Two hacking labs offered hands-on time with security and hacking procedures, and multiple breakout rooms provided for more intimate learning opportunities. The event, like ThreatLocker’s CEO, was very focused on hands-on experience.
Jenkins is as much a coder and developer himself, as well as an entrepreneur and business leader. When he and ThreatLocker’s chief product officer outlined the company’s addition of device-based cloud and network access controls for its Zero Trust platform, the pair recounted a tale of the work that had gone into the new product.
During production, and even in the week before launch, Jenkins had personally scrapped the code base at least a dozen times. He was even accused – no doubt in jest – he was the only negative contributor to the project. Jenkins really does believe that “failure is not an option”, and expects those in his team to follow his lead, 20-hour days and all. When asked if facing up to rising ransomware risks and ever-expanding threat surfaces was an insurmountable and demoralising challenge, Jenkins was typically bullish.
“So I think, first of all, if you do not worry that you are not keeping up in this, in any industry, then you probably should not be an entrepreneur,” Jenkins said.
“I think, you know, from a security point of view, I’m not concerned, because I know that the way we’re doing this doesn’t require us to keep innovating. But, you know, keeping up with the industry … I think if you don’t innovate in this industry, you die. I’ve seen it over and over again; Symantec once ruled the endpoint security market, and now they’re just gone.”
“I think in this industry, there’s an expectation that you’re always going to innovate, you’re always going to deliver, and I always fear that I’m not doing good enough, and I always fear that I’m not delivering good enough. But if you’re not, I think if you don’t in this world, you’re never going to get to where you want to be.
“If you don’t set that standard so high, you’re never going to get where your customers want you to be.”
Cyber Daily was a guest of ThreatLocker at Zero Trust World 2026.
David Hollingworth
David Hollingworth has been writing about technology for over 20 years, and has worked for a range of print and online titles in his career. He is enjoying getting to grips with cyber security, especially when it lets him talk about Lego.