Angela Heindl-Schober

CMO of Synack

LinkedIn profile for Angela Heindl-Schober

Angela Heindl-Schober is Chief Marketing Officer at Synack, the leading platform for human and agentic AI-powered penetration testing. With nearly three decades building and scaling global marketing organizations inside US technology companies, she has partnered with CEOs, boards, and investors to position companies for category leadership and sustained growth. Before joining Synack, Angela held senior marketing leadership roles at Vectra AI and HYCU, where she was SVP Global Marketing and a member of the Executive Leadership Team. She writes about cybersecurity strategy, CISO leadership, and what it takes to build marketing into a genuine growth engine.

Recent research

America’s AI Action Plan Is About Speed: AI Security Needs to Keep Up
America's AI Action Plan puts speed at the center of federal AI policy, reducing regulatory friction and accelerating adoption across government and industry. That same speed expands the AI attack surface just as fast, through new agents, APIs, and tool-calling chains shipped every week. Point-in-time pentests and quarterly assessments cannot keep pace with systems that change that often. AI security testing needs to run continuously and be backed by human-validated evidence.
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The EU AI Act Is Not Just a Compliance Deadline; It’s a Security Validation Challenge
The EU AI Act's security requirements go beyond governance documentation and AI literacy training. High-risk AI systems need adversarial testing to prove they can withstand real attacks. Policies describe intent. Testing produces evidence.
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More research by Angela Heindl-Schober

What Is Security Testing? A Practitioner’s Guide to Methods, Tools, and When to Use Each
Security testing identifies vulnerabilities, weaknesses, and misconfigurations before attackers can exploit them. This guide covers every major method, when to use each, and how to build a program that finds what actually matters.
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Continuous Penetration Testing: What Security Leaders Need to Know
“Continuous” has become the most stretched word in offensive security. This guide breaks down what continuous penetration testing means, why most of the market doesn’t deliver it, and how Synack’s Sara is bringing always-on, human-validated testing to the enterprise.
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The State of Continuous Security Validation: An Early Look at the Data
We’re sharing two headline numbers as an early look at our State of Continuous Security Validation report before the full analysis lands in July. Turns out 95% of security teams discover high or critical vulnerabilities outside their scheduled testing windows—proof that cadence alone is no longer a reliable measure of coverage.
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Attack Surface Discovery & Management: What Security Teams Need to Know
Most organizations have more internet-facing assets than they know about, and those unknown assets are where attackers look first. This guide breaks down how attack surface management works, how it complements penetration testing, and what separates programs that actually reduce risk from programs that just generate reports.
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Human-in-the-Loop: Why Human Validation Is the Trust Layer AI Still Needs
I’ve watched AI change three things in my world almost at once: how my team works, how our buyers make decisions, and how security teams decide what risk is actually real. Most days, that’s exciting. We lean on ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot — pick your assistant — to research a market, size up a Read more

AI Can’t Fix What It Can’t Trust: Why Continuous Security Validation Matters
Continuous Security Validation (CSV) is an ongoing offensive-security approach that pairs AI-powered testing with human expertise to continuously identify, validate, and prioritize real-world exploitable risk — so teams can trust which findings are safe for AI-driven remediation to act on. AI has made it easier than ever to generate vulnerability findings. But with the deluge Read more

AI Can Find More Vulnerabilities. Humans Still Decide What Matters.
Key Takeaways What AI Pentesting Means for Continuous Security Validation Every CISO conversation I’ve had this quarter circles back to the same problem: AI produces more vulnerability findings than security teams can read in a week, and it clouds their understanding of which findings are connected to real business risk. This week’s Wall Street Journal Read more

How CCPA Cybersecurity Audits Are Reshaping Cyber Governance
Key Takeaways Why Continuous Security Validation Matters California’s evolving privacy regulations are doing more than adding another compliance requirement. They’re changing how organizations think about cybersecurity governance, accountability, and operational resilience. The latest guidance around cybersecurity audits under the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) signals a broader shift happening across the industry. Security leaders are Read more

Continuous Security Validation Is Replacing Periodic Penetration Testing
Key Takeaways Why Traditional Pentesting No Longer Matches Modern Attack Surfaces Over the past year, the conversation around offensive security has changed faster than most enterprise programs have been able to adapt. AI is compressing attacker timelines; cloud and SaaS environments change daily; identity systems, APIs, and infrastructure shift continuously, not quarterly. And still, most Read more

Continuous Security Validation: Why It Matters and Why Synack Is Built for It
Key Takeaways Why Traditional Pentesting Cannot Keep Up With Modern Threats Cybersecurity environments grow more complex every year. Cloud infrastructure expands daily. New applications appear. APIs multiply. Attackers increasingly use automation and purpose-built AI tools—including offensive tools like GhostGPT—to identify weaknesses faster than security teams can remediate them. At RSA 2026, the recurring theme across Read more