AUSTIN, Texas – March 13, 2026 – SpyCloud, the leader in identity threat protection, today announced that two members of its team have been named Gold Award recipients in the 2026 Cybersecurity Excellence Awards. Jason Lancaster, Chief Investigations Officer, received the Gold Award for Cybersecurity Innovator of the Year, and Aurora Johnson, Manager of Security Research Partnerships, received the Gold Award for Cybersecurity Woman of the Year. Both awards are evaluated independently by a jury of cybersecurity practitioners, analysts, and CISOs.
“Jason and Aurora represent the best of what SpyCloud stands for – deep expertise, relentless curiosity, and an unwavering commitment to our mission of disrupting cybercrime and making the internet safer for everyone. These recognitions are well-deserved, and I couldn’t be prouder of the impact they’re making for our customers and the broader security community.”
Jason Lancaster – Cybersecurity Innovator of the Year
With nearly three decades of cybersecurity experience and a third of that leading SpyCloud’s Investigations team, Jason Lancaster – recently promoted to Chief Investigations Officer at SpyCloud – has spent his career moving faster than adversaries and enabling others to do the same.
This year, he spearheaded the enhancement of advanced AI Insights – an award winning approach to enhancing and expediting insider threat investigations – that embeds the tradecraft and analytical instincts of veteran investigators directly into a product that supports analysts at every skill level. The result is not just faster analysis, but finished intelligence – built on SpyCloud’s proprietary identity correlation technology, IDLink™, itself a product of Jason’s deep expertise.
SpyCloud Investigations with IDLink & AI Insights automates the process of connecting disparate exposed identity data into a comprehensive, holistic view of digital identities from a single search query – generating more than 12 times additional identity records, surfacing hidden connections, reducing dead ends, and accelerating threat actor attribution before surfacing up a full report of those correlations and analysis into an executive level report of insider threats.
The technology has already proven instrumental in real-world investigations, including identifying actors behind the DanaBot malware scheme, supporting thousands of human trafficking and child exploitation cases globally, and uncovering North Korean IT employment fraud schemes used to infiltrate Western enterprises.
Jason has also advised the United States Congress, worked directly with international law enforcement, and serves as a founding member of WEF’s Cybercrime Atlas Project.
Aurora Johnson — Cybersecurity Woman of the Year
Aurora Johnson brings a rare combination of technical depth, public service experience, and collaborative spirit to her role at SpyCloud. A former Senior Analyst at CISA and recipient of the President’s Volunteer Service Award, she leads SpyCloud’s Responsible Disclosure Program, ensuring that when SpyCloud uncovers breached or stolen data, affected organizations are notified swiftly, ethically, and with actionable intelligence. Under her leadership, the program completed more than 200 disclosures in a single year, including a coordinated outreach to organizations impacted by the Mother of All Breaches (MOAB).
As Manager of Security Research Partnerships and researcher at SpyCloud Labs, SpyCloud’s in-house security research team, Aurora helps steward the world’s largest repository of recaptured darknet intelligence – nearly a trillion assets from breaches, malware infections, and successful phishes. Her research has exposed systemic data leaks from within China’s surveillance infrastructure, the VenusTech and Salt Typhoon incidents, and criminals’ shift to using Meta’s Threads platform as a marketplace for stolen financial data.
Her work has been featured in Wired, The Register, and other leading cybersecurity media outlets. She has also presented original research at CYBERWARCON and LABScon.
“We congratulate SpyCloud for outstanding achievements in the ‘Cybersecurity Woman of the Year’ and ‘Cybersecurity Innovator of the Year’ categories of the 2026 Cybersecurity Excellence Awards. Selected by an independent jury of cybersecurity practitioners, analysts, and CISOs, this recognition highlights meaningful contributions that strengthen cybersecurity across organizations worldwide.”
About SpyCloud
SpyCloud transforms recaptured darknet data to disrupt cybercrime. Its automated identity threat protection solutions leverage advanced analytics to proactively prevent ransomware and account takeover, safeguard employee and consumer accounts, and accelerate cybercrime investigations. SpyCloud’s data from breaches, malware-infected devices, and successful phishes also powers many popular dark web monitoring and identity theft protection offerings. Customers include seven of the Fortune 10, along with hundreds of global enterprises, mid-sized companies, and government agencies worldwide. Headquartered in Austin, TX, SpyCloud is home to more than 200 cybersecurity experts whose mission is to protect businesses and consumers from the stolen identity data criminals are using to target them now.
To learn more and see insights on your company’s exposed data, visit spycloud.com.
About the Cybersecurity Excellence Awards
Celebrating more than a decade of excellence, the Cybersecurity Excellence Awards are an established global recognition program honoring companies, products, and professionals advancing cybersecurity worldwide. Presented by Cybersecurity Insiders — the trusted platform for CISO insight and strategic research — and backed by a community of over 600,000 security professionals, the awards are widely respected for spotlighting innovation, leadership, and contributions that shape the future of cybersecurity.