Simon Radford

Coming In from the Cold: Espionage in Today's Geopolitics | Global Conference 2025

Simon Radford, Darrell Blocker, Anthony Camerino, Christo Grozev, Katherine Mulhern, Jill Popelka, Nick Schifrin, Alyssa

A panel of intelligence experts and security leaders detailed Russia's structural advantage in leveraging privatized, competitive state violence, contrasting this with Western reliance on defensive measures and open-source investigations to counteract such malign operations. The discussion highlighted how adversaries exploit digital footprints, social engineering, and internal employee threats to compromise corporate executives, necessitating a dual security strategy that combines attack-centric defenses with business-centric anomaly detection. Furthermore, the speakers advocated for closing Western financial loopholes to halt illicit capital flows from Africa and Asia, arguing that recovering these stolen assets offers a sustainable alternative to foreign aid for stabilizing global economies.