Cybersecurity doesn’t usually conjure up images of the runway, yet for Chris Safarian, the connections come naturally. He’s an incident responder whose career path runs through the luxury fashion industry’s tech backbone, where a hemline feels old in six months, and an exploit feels old in six hours. Either way, stand still and you’re toast.
Chris came to TUMO to lead his first-ever learning lab, and it was an instant hit. He loved the experience, our students loved it too, and it felt like the perfect moment to sit down with him for our traditional 3.5 questions.
How did you end up in a field that’s basically ER for the internet?
I actually wanted to be a doctor when I was younger. My grandfather was one, and I loved the idea of helping people. But once I got my first computer as a pre-teen, my curiosity shifted fast. I loved breaking things apart and figuring out how they worked. Pretty soon, I realized how it all connected. Diagnosing problems, stopping “viruses,” and preventing the same thing from happening again. Incident response is triage for the digital world. You stop the bleeding, stabilize the patient, and dig into the root cause. For me, it became the perfect collision of medicine’s urgency and tech’s complexity.
What’s the biggest myth people believe about cybersecurity?
People picture a hoodie-clad hacker clacking away in a basement. In reality, it looks more like endless Slack threads and bug spreadsheets. For example, you cannot just dump a list of a thousand vulnerabilities on a team and expect them to fix it all. That is a surefire way to get nothing done. You have to be a partner, not a roadblock. That means understanding their workload, prioritizing what is most critical, what is most likely to be exploited, and what would have the biggest impact, and then presenting solutions in a way that is manageable.
People are also often called the “weakest link,” not because they are careless, but because they are not always equipped with the right knowledge. We have to design systems and training that make the secure choice the easiest choice. The trick isn’t blaming users, it’s making the secure option the lazy option. Click the right button because it’s easier than the wrong one.
How would a teen hack their way into cybersecurity?
I would tell them to spin up a homelab. It might sound complicated, but it can be as simple as setting up a few virtual machines with VirtualBox on an old computer. Try playing around with different operating systems like Kali Linux. The goal is not to be a pro overnight, but to learn how different tools and technologies work. It is a low-risk environment where you can experiment and learn from your mistakes.
Beyond the technical side, get into the habit of being a digital detective. Look up famous data breaches and hacks. There are tons of write-ups and analysis online. It is not just about the technical exploit, it is about understanding the whole story. Why did it happen? What was the motive? How could it have been prevented? This is what connects the technical skills with the creative problem-solving and critical thinking that the field demands.
Fun fact
Luxury fashion and incident response share the same survival rule: miss the next trend and you’re irrelevant. Designers stay ahead by reinventing looks season after season. Hackers do the same with new exploits, only their “collections” drop without warning. Both worlds punish you the second you stand still.