The cybersecurity industry has no shortage of booths, demos, product launches, and vendor pitches. At major events such as Black Hat, security leaders can spend days moving from one conversation to the next, often becoming the people everyone wants 15 minutes from.
Daylight Security decided to flip that dynamic.
Instead of building a traditional booth at Black Hat, the company introduced the “CISO Genie,” a private concierge designed to help security leaders with the practical challenges of navigating the conference. The initiative became the focus of a pair of humorous videos shared on LinkedIn by Hagai Shapira, Co-Founder and CEO of Daylight, drawing significant engagement while giving the company a creative way to communicate its approach to serving CISOs.
The first video opens with a CISO meeting the fictional genie, who explains his role in unusually specific terms.
“I grant wishes for CISOs. I investigate incidents, calm down executives, and convince security teams not to quit.”
The concept quickly moves beyond the traditional three-wishes formula. The genie offers a range of services, including a quiet meeting room, fresh shirt, dinner reservation, private airport pickup, and personal barber.
“Used to be three. Then someone hacked the lamp. Changed it to unlimited.”
The joke is built around a serious observation: Security leaders attending major industry events have their own needs, but those needs are rarely the focus of the conference experience.
A Different Kind Of Black Hat Presence
Daylight’s decision to skip the traditional booth is central to the campaign. In the LinkedIn post accompanying the first video, Shapira wrote, “A Black Hat booth costs about the same as taking care of 150 CISOs for an entire week. We chose the CISOs.”
That decision is reflected in the concierge services described in the post, which include airport pickup, coffee, a quiet room, and a charger before a phone dies. Rather than asking security leaders for their time, the campaign is built around providing something in return.
“Someone finally asking CISOs what they need, instead of asking for 15 minutes of their time,” Shapira wrote.
The video takes that premise and turns it into a series of increasingly absurd requests. When the genie is asked whether Black Hat is really that difficult, he responds, “We classify Black Hat as a hostile environment.”
Another scene has the genie helping a CISO who forgot to buy his child a present. The situation is treated with the same urgency as a security incident.
“Tell me that’s not a threat,” the genie says.
The humor also extends to the company’s own positioning. When asked about Daylight, the genie responds, “We redefined security. We also redefined security. We redefined the redefinition.”
The exchange plays on the industry’s tendency to continually redefine cybersecurity categories and terminology, while keeping the focus on the campaign’s central character: the CISO trying to survive another demanding conference.
From CISO Concierge To “Vendor Nightmares”
Daylight continued the campaign with a second video, again shared by Shapira on LinkedIn. The sequel begins with a joke about the company’s branding efforts: “Marketing said there wasn’t enough daylight branding in the first video, so we made a few adjustments.”
The second episode expands on the CISO Genie’s fictional workload. One person asks if there is a faster way across Mandalay Bay. Another requests a table for eight at Carbone at 7 p.m., which the genie describes as more difficult than a ransomware negotiation.
“I’ve handled ransomware negotiations. This was harder.”
The video then turns its attention toward another familiar feature of the cybersecurity industry: the relentless use of technology buzzwords. The genie demonstrates how he supposedly keeps up with everything he needs to know by repeatedly chanting, “We’re agentic! We’re agentic! We’re AI-native agentic! Again! More disruptive! Agentic! Every morning.”
The second video also introduces the “quiet room,” which the genie calls “the most important room at Black Hat.”
“Why are we whispering?”
“CISOs are recovering.”
The accompanying LinkedIn post keeps the tone deliberately light. “No thought leadership today. Just press play,” Shapira wrote. He also clarified the line between the campaign’s fiction and reality: “The concierge is real. The training academy is not.”
Behind the humor, however, is a consistent message. Daylight’s first LinkedIn post states that the company was built around the belief that “security services should feel different. Less noise. Less friction. Better outcomes. More accountability.”
The CISO Genie campaign translates that philosophy into something audiences can immediately understand. Instead of using Black Hat as another opportunity to ask security leaders for their attention, Daylight created a campaign centered on giving something back. In doing so, the company has turned a familiar cybersecurity conference experience into a story about the people who are usually expected to navigate it.
