Detection at Scale

Aston Martin’s Robin Smith: Advocating For Lean Security Programs

Robin Smith is the Head of Cyber and Information Security at Aston Martin and he brings a fresh and unique voice to the security industry.

He advocates for a lean, progressive security mindset where it's crucial thinking around processes to make sure that organizations are not unnecessarily wasting resources while committing to continuous improvement at the same time.

Tune in to learn more about what lean security is, why Robin has always seen security as an asset, and how you can embed that value into your organization.

Topic discussed in this episode:

• How Robin arrived in information security.
• Why he believes we need new voices in the industry.
• The time he wrote 'The Lean Information Management Toolkit'.
• Why he considers security as an asset and how to embed that value across an organization.
• What the concept of lean security implies.
• How lean security applies to security monitoring and detection.
• Desired outcomes for security detection platforms.
• Metrics for a lean security program.
• The approach of practicality when deploying technology.
• 3 Pieces of advice to succeed at effective detection at scale.

Snowflake’s Haider Dost and Daniel Wyleczuk-Stern: Why Querying Your Data Properly is Critical to Scaling Your Detection Program

If you were building a detection program today, what would be your top resources to start with?

As we head into a cloud-based future, the ability of handling increased data sets becomes crucial, teams need to have processes in place that cover the entire detection lifecycle, and develop skills necessary to help build, grow and improve a successful detection program.

In today's episode, we had an insightful conversation with Snowflake’s Global Threat Intelligence and Detection Engineering Leader, Haider Dost and Senior Security Engineer, Daniel Wyleczuk-Stern where we discovered why data and being able to query that data is a critical first step.

Topics discussed in this episode:

• Haider's and Daniel's background in security.
• The precursors and skills necessary to becoming an engineer.
• A high level approach to building strong detection teams.
• The importance of collecting and correlating log sources for a proper incident response.
• How to be proactive when building your detection baseline.
• What a detection lifecycle process is and why every team should have one.
• What the biggest challenges of building a detection program are.
• Why it’s critical that responders or analysts have a sense of ownership on the detections that are being built.
• How security teams at Fortune 500 and Silicon Valley companies differ from each other.

Rumble’s Chris Kirsch: How Asset Discovery Can Help with Detection and Response

Have you ever thought you could find more assets in your network that you thought you would have? Do you have segments that haven't been scanned yet? Or maybe subnets that you have ignored?

These and much more is what asset discovery brings to the table to any security team, helping to prevent the next big incident.

In today's episode we sat down with Chris Kirsch, CEO and co-founder of Rumble and chatted about why covering the basics, like having a full inventory of your network with all the managed and unmanaged devices, is a best practice to secure any environment.

Topics discussed in this episode:

• Rumble's founding story and background
• Why Rumble's engine is very benign to the network
• Where customers that migrate to Rumble come from
• Why vulnerability scanners don't tell much about what a particular asset is
• A two point approach for asset discovery in a cloud environment
• How customers use Rumble in a response style situation
• 3 Pieces of advice to succeed at asset management and device security in the future.

Cisco Secure‘s J. Wolfgang Goerlich: Rebuilding Trust in Security Tools

Why is SIEM an area of unease for so many security officers?

To make detection and response successful, we need tools capable of upscaling the practitioners as well as equipping them to be successful. We need tools we can rely on.

In today's episode, we had an inspiring conversation with J Wolfgang Goerlich, Advisory CISO at Cisco Secure. We discussed how trust is a determinant factor in building the security tools of the future, why so many CISOs lost trust over SIEMs and what we can do to rebuild it.

Topics discussed in this episode:

• Wolf's role as advisory CISO.
• How we can use technology to solve business problems
• How CISOs perceive SIEMs today and security monitoring as a practice
• The investigative side versus the detection side of SIEMs
• How the detection personas have changed with the movement to the cloud
• Challenges of doing detection in the modern day
• The story of when Wolf worked in an open source project
• How Wolf advises CISOs on making a build versus buy decision
• How detection and response will evolve in the coming years
• 3 pieces of actionable advice to succeed with building effective detection programs at scale

Netflix’s Srinath Kuruvadi: Securing The Cloud Footprint With an Adaptive, Agile, and People Leadership Approach

Securing the environment and scaling operations of the world's leading streaming entertainment service is massive.

Srinath Kuruvadi is the head of cloud infrastructure security at Netflix. Before Netflix, he spent more than 15 years building security solutions and leading teams at Google, Facebook, Snapchat, Lyft, and Mapbox.

In today's episode, he shares how his leadership skills have evolved over time, where he puts his focus when approaching infrastructure security, and what he believes are the key ingredients any security team should have today.

Topics discussed in this episode:

• How Srinath got his start in security and landed as head of infrastructure cloud security at Netflix 
• Lessons in leading a team that’s 10+ years old
• ConsoleMe and why they built it 
• Srinath’s unique approach to infrastructure security 
• Why ‘people challenges’ carry more weight than ‘technical challenges’ when it comes to infrastructure security 
• Why security teams should seek out the open source tools big tech companies use
• His take on trends and tools in the cloud security space 
• 3 pieces of advice to succeed in detection at scale 

Dropbox‘s Matt Jezorek: The Value of Agility and Education For Scaling Security

How does anything scale as a leader? 

For today's guest, security has always been a puzzle in which the only variable we do get to control is time; specifically, all the decisions that enable us to control how fast we detect threats.

Am I going to be agile with this tool? How fast can I deploy detection if something happens today? How many hours is it going to take me to understand if it happens again or if it's still happening? 

These are some of the questions Matt Jezorek likes to ask himself. Matt is the Vice President of Security and Platform Abuse at Dropbox,  an Information Security Executive with multinational fortune 50 experience who can think like an attacker and still speak to the business. 

Topics discussed in this episode:

• Matt's background and his number one motivator: "taking care of his family"
• What he enjoys the most about security (what he likes to call ‘The Grayness of Security’)
• Why educating others can help scale security
• How Matt keeps up as a security leader
• The value of agility in detection at scale
• What he considers should be prioritized in automation and problem solving
• How we can maintain customer trust
• How Matt knows if he is doing a good job as a security leader: hygiene, aspirational and agile metrics.
• Why time is the only variable we can control
• Lessons learned from bad management experiences
• 3 pieces of advice for security teams that are working hard to protect customers

Talkdesk‘s Miguel Viana: Risk Management In a Cloud Environment

Risk management has shifted from a traditional mindset to an integrated view, where engagement of all departments across an enterprise is crucial to address threats properly.

In today's episode we sat down with Miguel Viana from Talkdesk to discuss how security teams provide guidance to identify vulnerabilities and how risk management processes evolve in a fast-paced growing team.

Topics discussed in this episode:

• Miguel Viana's background in the security industry
• How risk management evolves as company grows
• Threat modeling in the risk management process
• Typical security threats that worry Talkdesk the most 
• The importance of due diligence in third party management
• Miguel’s advocacy for security education programs
• How to build a strong security culture in a company

Gusto’s Fredrick Lee: Why Trust Is Critical To Building a Scalable Security Team

"The people who actually work with me (not for me), do their jobs better"

Gusto is a People Platform and as the Chief Information Security Officer, Fredrick Lee (AKA Lee) knows company value starts with your employees. If you don't take care of your employees, you can't take care of your customers.

Being a great leader is not only about inspiring your team and making them want to do more but also, and more importantly, is about transparency and building trust.

Tune in into today's episode for a master class on how to lead a security organization from the trenches.

Topics discussed in this episode:

• What makes a great security leader
• The power of transparency in leadership.
• Why it is important that security leaders have experience practicing beyond management.
• What inspired Flee to make the jump from being a practitioner to being a leader.
• How to join a new company and build a security program from zero.
• What security teams can do when working in a hypergrowth environment.
• Why Flee trusts people but not computers.
• 3 Pieces of advice to security leaders that you can't miss!

OutSystems’s Gilbert Martin: How Using Tools Can Help Promote Strong Cloud Infrastructure Security

Not so long ago security was 'more manual' and therefore, riskier. Important systems would drift in their configuration, people would go on and change things manually.

Over the past decade, there has been a shift from tools that were doing infrastructure as code to immutable infrastructure. Technology now allows you to be updated, gives you the ability to retrain, and have a repeatable process. 

Gilbert Martin is the Head of Cloud Security at OutSystems and a big believer in taking a developer first approach to a lot of the things that we do in security. One of those is creating an image pipeline.

In today's episode, Gilbert walks us through the idea of how using the right tools can help you promote better cloud infrastructure security.

Topics discussed in this episode:

• Gilbert’s background in security.
• What the cloud environment was when he started.
• How immutable infrastructure has helped remove unpredictability and insecurity.
• Why it's important for any organization to have a software asset inventory.
• Gilbert's approach to dealing with systems that he finds some issue/ violation.
• How he uses Kubernetes and Serverless: pros and cons.
• Why visibility is essential for doing security at scale.
• Keys to interact with instant response teams.
• How to succeed at applying cloud security at scale in the future.

Snowflake’s Omer Singer: What Security Data Can Tell You About Detection and Response

Cyber security is difficult. It's asymmetric and the advantage falls on the attacker side.

When Omer Singer realized this, he felt inspired to join the military service in Israel. After what he saw by being on the offensive side, moving to the defense was challenging. How would he reconcile both sides of the same coin? 

Omer Singer is now Head of Cyber Security Strategy at Snowflake and in this episode, he shares what was the game changing approach that made him flip into doing detection. 

Listen to Omer for great insights and advice on how to break into today's data driven cyber security industry.

Topics discussed in this episode:

• Omer's beginnings and background in penetration testing.
• How Omer made the flip into doing detection.
• How joining Snowflake changed his perspective about being on the defense side.
• The power of data in security and how it tells you things you didn't know how to ask for.
• When Snowflake started their security journey.
• Omer's approach on building a high fidelity system and retaining high fidelity alerting.
• Advice on how to build a strategy around data when you're starting from scratch.
• How security programs and systems scale along with data growth.
• First objectives when he started leading Snowflake cyber security.
• 3 Pieces of actionable advice to succeed at detection at scale.