CISO Conversations: Ross McKerchar, CISO at Sophos
SecurityWeek, Wednesday, April 15th, 2026
Sophos' Ross McKerchar discusses leadership at scale, retaining talent, defending against AI-enabled threats, and the industry's growing trust problem.
Ross McKerchar began his Sophos career as the firm's first security engineer 18 years ago and is now the company's CISO. We discussed his journey and the role of the CISO.
'Like most youngsters, I played video games as a child. By the time I was 16, I was already convinced that IT would be a good, solid career - so I went on to take a computer science degree at the University of Edinburgh.'
But then came a realization. 'I'm probably going to offend a lot of people with this, but much of IT is quite boring.' When you talk about IT, people's eyes glaze over, he continues. But if you talk about cybercrime, they become engaged. 'It's whole of world rather than just the box in the computer room. It's geopolitical, it's adversarial, and it affects everybody, everywhere.' Conflict, he adds, makes for good stories - so, he shifted his interest from IT to cybersecurity