Tencast

An Arabic-language podcast for entrepreneurs and exceptional people across the GCC. Honest, long-form conversations with founders, builders, and operators about what it actually takes to build something. Hosted by Mahmoud Lotfy.

Episodes

Building a Stablecoin Super Bank for the Middle East — Seth & George, Kem · Jan 2026
Action First: Building a Luxury Watch Micro-brand from Scratch — Fahad Buqammaz, BSHQRF · Dec 2025
Open Source, Digital Sovereignty and the Foreigner Complex — Bashar Al-Abdulhadi, Kuwait Net · Nov 2025
Breaking Engineering Standards to Design for the Human Experience — Nouf Al-Khubaizi, Independent Architect · Nov 2025
What Tencast Is: One Leader, Ten Questions, Under 30 Minutes — Mahmoud Lotfy, Tencast · Nov 2025

Mahmoud Lotfy

Cybersecurity Consultant & Independent Security Researcher, Cairo

About Mahmoud Lotfy

Mahmoud Lotfy is a cybersecurity consultant and independent security researcher based in Cairo, Egypt. He works with organisations across the Gulf Cooperation Council region on cyber risk assessment, threat intelligence, governance, and security strategy.

Mahmoud began his career as a SOC analyst at one of the UK's largest broadband providers, where he spent two years on the frontline of security operations, developing expertise in security monitoring, alert triage, and threat detection. He then moved into consulting at SecurityHQ, working across more than seven clients simultaneously on incident response, forensic analysis, threat modelling, and governance frameworks.

He is building Excera, a research project into human risk intelligence for the agentic enterprise. Excera is a working prototype that generates a personal, voice-first threat briefing in Arabic and English for every employee, scoped to what they can authorise: moving money, granting access, approving AI agent actions.

Mahmoud hosts Tencast, an Arabic-language podcast featuring founders and operators across the Gulf in long-form conversations about building businesses in the region.

He holds a BSc (Honours) in Cybersecurity from Northumbria University, where his dissertation examined spear phishing vulnerability and the effectiveness of live attack demonstrations as a training intervention.

Recent Writing

We keep asking the wrong question about AI. AI doesn't have to be correct to be persuasive. Every AI failure reaches the same moment: a person looks at an output, accepts it as credible, and acts on it.
What most organisations get wrong about threat intelligence. Most companies treat threat intelligence as a feed they subscribe to and forget about. The real value comes from understanding how threats specifically apply to your environment.
Why your biggest security risk is probably someone you trust. 83% of organisations reported at least one insider attack in the last year. The breach that actually hurts tends to start much closer to home.
Why the human layer is the hardest security problem to solve. Most security budgets invest heavily in technical controls. The human layer sits near the bottom of the list. That's the wrong order of priorities.
The Gulf has mandated cybersecurity awareness training. Nobody told the training to speak Arabic. Every enterprise in the GCC is now legally required to train its people on cybersecurity. The platforms doing that training were built for someone else entirely.

Contact

Email: mahmoud@excera.live

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/mahmoud-lotfy