“I’ve tried different brands of hearing aids, and they’re good, but they’re not this good,” says Martin in a Zoom interview. He visited the team in Soho, did the street test, and was delighted when he tried it with his wife and daughter at their favorite restaurant, with de Jonge sitting with the laptop several tables away. But the clincher for Martin was a cocktail party.
“I was here in our building, and I was at a party upstairs, and I had my old hearing aids in,” he says. “I’m sitting talking to four people, and I realized I can’t understand any of them, and I go, wait, I have these new hearing aids. I went downstairs, put them in, came back, and I could hear everyone.” Now he wears them all the time, and even made a joke about hearing aids on Saturday Night Live’s 50th anniversary special. “I don’t really think about the way it used to be,” he says. “I used to dread going to a restaurant, and now I don’t.” His friend Balaban, once he got into the beta test, is similarly smitten. “This is a significant improvement over the absurdly pricey devices I’d been using,” Balaban says.
Other machers aren’t public, but de Jonge assures me they are mostly names invoked in boldface type. Since there are only a few dozen beta units, this means that some powerful people have been shuttled to a waiting list. Balaban’s wife, Lynn Grossman, recounts attending a Labor Day dinner with over 100 people, generally of a certain age, in a private room in a restaurant, thinking that her husband and another guy—a famous CEO in the fashion world—were the only ones who could hear, because of Fortell. “After, I think Bob got 12 or 14 emails saying, ‘How do I get those hearing aids?’”
Now that the product is launched, Fortell will sell hearing aids in a single clinic on Manhattan’s Park Avenue. It’s decked out like a posh lounge, with the devices on display in a tasteful presentation that’s straight out of the Apple retail playbook. Hanging on the wall is a silicon wafer with the circuitry of the custom chips. In the early stages, his staff of four audiologists will serve only a couple of dozen customers a week, to make sure everything goes smoothly. In any case, while ramping up production, the supply will be limited.
This is great for Fortell, but it seems de Jonge’s initial impulse to usher everyone’s grandparents into the land of the hearing is in danger of being limited to the one percent, which doesn’t exactly qualify him for a Salk medal. When I ask de Jonge how his invention can scale to change life for the masses, his replies, whether due to secrecy on future plans or just not having a good answer, seem hand-wavy. In his defense, Fortell has resisted the temptation to jack up the traditional price of premium hearing aids—the $6,800 is actually a bit less than some other medically prescribed hearing aids. (As with other high-end hearing aids, the price is part of a package that includes fitting and support from professional audiologists.) Still, even that defensible price tag limits adoption; it’s a sad fact that some Medicare and many health insurance plans do not cover hearing aids, a policy that dooms millions to an aural bardo of conversational exclusion, isolating them from loved ones and hastening dementia.
It’s unclear whether Fortell technology might find its way into the less expensive over-the-counter hearing aids available today, which became possible via a Biden-era shift in regulation. These include Apple’s AirPods Pro 2 devices and entries from other consumer electronics brands, which are generally known to help those with hearing loss but not as much as high-end devices that are paired with professional support. The Fortell proposition requires careful testing and tuning, continuing for some time as wearers get used to the devices. In any case, that white-glove approach will consume Fortell’s efforts for the next year and more. Expansion will come by opening clinics in a few select cities, and only later will Fortell consider scaling to allow others to sell the technology.
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![US cybersecurity agency CISA had to build its incident playbook during the incident, agency reveals | TechCrunch
U.S. federal cybersecurity agency CISA said it did not have a prepared response plan for how it should handle a cybersecurity incident in May, after an investigative reporter notified the agency that a contractor had publicly exposed sensitive keys and credentials for accessing U.S. government systems.
CISA, the Homeland Security unit tasked with defending federal networks and helping to safeguard critical infrastructure, revealed Friday in a postmortem report that its staff “had to spend time building [a playbook] during the early stages of the incident.” The agency said it is important to prepare playbooks for “all anticipated needs” to ensure that organizations are ready to respond in the event of a security incident rather than scrambling to improvise one in real time.
The agency did not say how long the missing playbook delayed CISA’s response, and a spokesperson did not immediately respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment.
Independent cybersecurity journalist Brian Krebs reported in May that a security researcher with cyber firm GitGuardian alerted him to reams of exposed passwords stored in a publicly accessible GitHub repository, which an employee of a CISA contractor had uploaded.
According to Krebs, the researcher tried to alert the contractor but didn’t hear back. Only after Krebs contacted CISA did the agency take the repository offline and revoke and replace all of the exposed credentials to prevent any potential future abuse.
CISA said that no customer or mission data was exposed in the incident and thanked the researcher and reporter for their help. The agency said that its channels for allowing security researchers to notify CISA of potential incidents “were not well defined,” and that it has made changes to make it easier and faster for researchers to contact the agency.
CISA has been without a permanent director since the start of President Donald Trump’s second term in January 2025. The agency has also been affected by cuts, furloughs, and layoffs affecting about a third of its workforce since Trump took office.
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.#cybersecurity #agency #CISA #build #incident #playbook #incident #agency #reveals #TechCrunchCISA,cybersecurity,us government](https://i0.wp.com/techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/cisa-2240293485.jpg?resize=1200%2C800&ssl=1 "US cybersecurity agency CISA had to build its incident playbook during the incident, agency reveals | TechCrunch
U.S. federal cybersecurity agency CISA said it did not have a prepared response plan for how it should handle a cybersecurity incident in May, after an investigative reporter notified the agency that a contractor had publicly exposed sensitive keys and credentials for accessing U.S. government systems.
CISA, the Homeland Security unit tasked with defending federal networks and helping to safeguard critical infrastructure, revealed Friday in a postmortem report that its staff “had to spend time building [a playbook] during the early stages of the incident.” The agency said it is important to prepare playbooks for “all anticipated needs” to ensure that organizations are ready to respond in the event of a security incident rather than scrambling to improvise one in real time.
The agency did not say how long the missing playbook delayed CISA’s response, and a spokesperson did not immediately respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment.
Independent cybersecurity journalist Brian Krebs reported in May that a security researcher with cyber firm GitGuardian alerted him to reams of exposed passwords stored in a publicly accessible GitHub repository, which an employee of a CISA contractor had uploaded.
According to Krebs, the researcher tried to alert the contractor but didn’t hear back. Only after Krebs contacted CISA did the agency take the repository offline and revoke and replace all of the exposed credentials to prevent any potential future abuse.
CISA said that no customer or mission data was exposed in the incident and thanked the researcher and reporter for their help. The agency said that its channels for allowing security researchers to notify CISA of potential incidents “were not well defined,” and that it has made changes to make it easier and faster for researchers to contact the agency.
CISA has been without a permanent director since the start of President Donald Trump’s second term in January 2025. The agency has also been affected by cuts, furloughs, and layoffs affecting about a third of its workforce since Trump took office.
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.#cybersecurity #agency #CISA #build #incident #playbook #incident #agency #reveals #TechCrunchCISA,cybersecurity,us government")
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