By 2014, Stuart McClure was three years into building Cylance — a company that had staked its entire commercial thesis on a contrarian claim: that AI and machine learning could prevent cyberattacks before they executed, without relying on signatures, behavioral analysis, or sandboxing. The AT&T Cybersecurity Conference keynote gave Stuart one of his highest-profile platforms yet to make that case to enterprise security decision-makers.
AT&T's annual cybersecurity conference brought together some of the largest enterprise security buyers in the country — the CISOs and security architects of Fortune 500 companies, major telecommunications providers, and critical infrastructure operators. For Stuart, it was an opportunity to challenge an audience of sophisticated practitioners who had spent their careers in the signature-based paradigm and convince them that a mathematical, AI-driven approach was not just theoretically superior but practically proven.
The timing was significant. 2014 was the year that Operation Cleaver — a sophisticated Iranian state-sponsored attack campaign against global critical infrastructure — came to public attention through Cylance's own research. The campaign, targeting airlines, energy companies, hospitals, and military contractors across 16 countries, was exactly the kind of threat that traditional security tools were systematically failing to detect. Stuart's keynote at AT&T put that real-world threat intelligence in context: this is what is happening, this is why the existing tools are not catching it, and here is a different way of thinking about the problem.
This keynote is part of a sustained campaign of industry education that Stuart conducted throughout Cylance's growth years, building the credibility and understanding among enterprise buyers that eventually drove the company to a $1.5 billion acquisition.