ABOUT KATHY ZANT
I learned technology by watching it break.
For more than two decades, Kathy Zant has worked at the intersection of security, technology, business, and human behavior. The job titles changed. The question underneath them rarely did: what are we assuming, and what happens when that assumption fails?
THE THROUGHLINE
From compromised servers to consequential decisions.
Security was the laboratory. Cleaning close to 5,000 hacked WordPress sites meant seeing failure without the benefit of theory: what attackers noticed, what defenders missed, where process broke down, and how quickly a small assumption could become an expensive incident.
WordPress widened the lens. Work at Wordfence, Kadence, and GeneratePress brought questions of security, disclosure, trust, product adoption, communication, and governance into an ecosystem used across a meaningful portion of the web.
AI makes those questions urgent again. The technology is different. The organizational patterns are familiar: capability arriving before policy, adoption outrunning understanding, and accountability becoming blurry precisely when it matters most.
SELECTED EXPERIENCE
Credibility earned in production.
Close to 5,000 compromised WordPress sites cleaned, with a malware-remediation process developed from that experience.
Helped bring Defiant / Wordfence on as a CVE Numbering Authority with MITRE.
Recognized as a top-performing Wordfence security analyst.
Senior marketing leadership across major WordPress product companies, including Kadence and GeneratePress.
A POINT OF VIEW
Technical expertise is useful. Judgment is what you do with it.
Zantastic exists for work that benefits from both: understanding the technology deeply enough to see what can go wrong, and understanding people and organizations well enough to know why it probably will. Kathy brings that perspective to advisory work, speaking, education, and the unusual problems that resist tidy categories.