For studio heads

A fractional CISO
who has shipped games.

A fractional CISO gives a studio senior security judgment without a senior security salary — typically one to four days a month for an advisory engagement, or one to two days a week for someone actually running it. For studios, the work concentrates in three places: anti-cheat strategy, the build pipeline, and being ready on launch day.

What is actually different about studio security

Most security advice is written for companies whose product is a service and whose users are employees. A studio inverts both. Your product ships to millions of adversarial users, some of whom will spend more effort attacking it than your team spent building the feature. And the thing that would hurt most is not a data breach in the ordinary sense.

Cheating is a revenue problem

Every percentage point of players who quit over cheaters is churn you already paid to acquire. That cost sits in a marketing spreadsheet rather than a security one, which is why it rarely gets funded as what it is. Anti-cheat is partly design, partly detection, and partly an operational commitment to keep responding after launch week.

The build pipeline is the attack surface

Attackers largely stopped attacking games directly and started attacking the systems that build them. A pipeline has credentials to everything, is usually the least-reviewed part of the estate, and will happily sign whatever it is handed. Compromise there is worse than compromise almost anywhere else, because it ships.

Launch day is an incident you can schedule

Launch is the one day the entire internet arrives at once, including the people who want to break it, and you know the date months in advance. Very few studios use that. Running security for launch day on some of the largest live-service titles in the industry is mostly about deciding, in advance, who is allowed to make which call while everything is on fire.

What a fractional engagement covers

• Anti-cheat strategy. What you detect, what you tolerate, what you ban for, and how you handle the appeals you will get wrong.
• Pipeline and build-system security. Who can reach the thing that signs your builds, and what happens if that is wrong.
• Incident readiness. Named decision-makers, a call tree that survives a weekend, and a plan that does not require reading a document during the incident.
• Player data and platform requirements. Including the obligations that come with a younger audience, which get materially stricter the moment your player base skews that way.
• Publisher and platform-holder scrutiny. The security questions that arrive attached to a distribution deal, answered once and reused.

Why me specifically

I ran security architecture across 35 studios and more than 100,000 endpoints, including launch-day operations for some of the largest live-service titles ever shipped, through the largest acquisition the games industry has seen. I have also spent twenty years inside gaming culture rather than adjacent to it — eighteen of them directing a major convention's gaming track. Studios can tell the difference within about ten minutes, and so can I.

The integration case file covers what that engagement actually involved.