A narrative cybersecurity newsletter exploring breaches, failures, and leadership lessons through story.
Tales from the Digital Realm is a newsletter where I retell real world cybersecurity events as epic stories, archetypes, and modern myths.
Each issue takes a breach, incident, or industry shift and reframes it through narrative, turning technical failures and policy oversights into warnings, prophecies, and fables that people actually remember.
The goal is simple. Make cybersecurity human.
Not just a list of vulnerabilities, but stories people carry with them when it matters most.
What This Is
Tales from the Digital Realm is a public storytelling and thought leadership project.
Every issue explores a real cybersecurity event through fiction inspired by myth, fantasy, and archetypal storytelling, followed by reflection on the leadership, risk, and communication lessons underneath.
It sits at the intersection of:
Cybersecurity education
Risk communication
Narrative leadership
Creative nonfiction and fable
What You’ll Find
Each issue reimagines a real incident as a short narrative:
Breaches become dragons and sieges
Attackers become tricksters, infiltrators, and traitors
CISOs and leaders become kings, oracles, and reluctant heroes
Every story is grounded in real events and designed to surface the human side of security failures, trade offs, and decision making.
Who This Is For
Security professionals looking for better ways to communicate risk and lessons learned
Leaders and executives who want to understand incidents without technical overload
Educators and trainers exploring narrative driven learning
Readers who enjoy fantasy and do not mind learning something useful along the way
Why I Write This
After years of writing reports, reviewing post mortems, and briefing leaders, I noticed something frustrating.
Most lessons are technically accurate. Most recommendations are sensible. And almost all of them are forgotten.
But stories stick.
People remember dragons that guarded the wrong gate. They remember oracles whose warnings went unheeded. They remember tricksters who slipped past defenses everyone trusted.
I write Tales from the Digital Realm as an experiment.
What if breach reports became cautionary tales? What if leadership failures became fables people retell? What if storytelling could help teams recognize patterns before they repeat them?
What This Shows About How I Think
This project reflects how I approach security leadership and education:
Memory matters more than documentation
Story is one of the most powerful tools for teaching risk
Security failures are ultimately about people and decisions
Patterns repeat, even when technology changes
The newsletter is both a creative outlet and a living lab for exploring how narrative can improve the way we teach and communicate about cybersecurity.