Take your phishing click rate from 60% to under 5%. Sustainably.

Emmanuel Nicaise has spent more than thirty years in information security — long enough, he admits, to qualify as something of a dinosaur. He started out configuring Novell networks and SCO Unix servers, then moved into security when the Internet was still a novelty, and later into risk management, eventually serving as a CISO. Along the way, he wondered why so many security problems kept coming back to the same place: people.

So he went back to university and earned a master's degree in clinical psychology, followed by doctoral research at the Université libre de Bruxelles on epistemic vigilance — the mental processes we use to decide whom and what to trust — and how it shapes our ability to detect phishing.

That research found a practical testing ground when a large international financial institution asked him to build its human-security programme. Rather than running yet another awareness campaign, he used the scientific evidence available to design an evidence-based — and evidence-collecting — behaviour change programme. The lessons learned there, and with the organisations he has helped since through his consultancy, Apalala, became the foundation of Get Phishing Under Control.

Emmanuel holds the CISSP, CISA and CISM certifications, co-founded and chaired the (ISC)² Belux Chapter, and speaks regularly at security conferences such as BruCON and Hack.lu. He lives in Belgium, where he remains happily curious about the human side of technology — including what AI reveals about our own cognition.