CISO Series Podcast

All links and images for this episode can be found on CISO Series https://cisoseries.com/something-stinks-in-here-i-think-it's-your-code/ The problem isn't our users, it's you and your past due code. Something happened. It's either been tainted or expired, but whatever it is, it smells and you need to clean it up. This episode is hosted by me, David Spark (@dspark), producer of CISO Series and Mike Johnson. Our sponsored guest this week is Brian Fox (@brian_fox), co-founder and CTO, Sonatype. Thanks to our podcast sponsor, Sonatype With security concerns around software supply chains ushered to center stage in recent months, organizations around the world are turning to Sonatype as trusted advisors. The company's Nexus platform offers the only full-spectrum control of the cloud-native software development lifecycle including third-party open source code, first-party source code, infrastructure as code, and containerized code. In this episode: How do you know if your DevSecOps effort is going to fail? How does an analyst justify their existence? Managing malicious intruders in code libraries Managing cybersecurity hygiene in the software chain

All links and images for this episode can be found on CISO Series https://cisoseries.com/our-top-ten-list-of-vendors-that-arent-you/ You look at a top ten list is to see if you made the list. Don't bother. You're not on it. This episode is hosted by me, David Spark (@dspark), producer of CISO Series and Mike Johnson. Our guest this week is Nancy Hunter, vp, CISO, Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia. Thanks to our podcast sponsor, Code42 Redefine data security standards for the hybrid workforce. Check out Code42. In this episode: Threat tracking: what's better? Your SOC's data or reading industry trends? Finding good security people -what's better?: existing skills/experience, or a hunger to learn? Listing the things we like about security vendors Diversity hiring still has some challenges

All links and images for this episode can be found on CISO Series https://cisoseries.com/do-we-have-to-let-the-ciso-sit-with-us/ I guess because it's a pandemic, and we really need them, just this one time, we'll let the CISO hang out at the cool kids' table. This episode is hosted by me, David Spark (@dspark), producer of CISO Series and Mike Johnson. Our sponsored guest this week is Jadee Hanson (@jadeehanson), CISO, Code42. Thanks to our podcast sponsor, Code42 Redefine data security standards for the hybrid workforce. Check out Code42. In this episode: Apparently, CIOs have become really hot commodities within the organization Do compliance checkboxes to third party surveys provide any security for the supply chain? Insider risk should look more at mistakes as well as intentional acts The real value of vendor white papers

All links and images for this episode can be found on CISO Series https://cisoseries.com/why-commute-when-you-can-stay-home-and-be-overworked/ Work from home seemed ideal until you realized you were working at all hours with people all over the world. It would actually be a nice respite to have to commute and leave work at a reasonable hour. This episode is hosted by me, David Spark (@dspark), producer of CISO Series and Mike Johnson. Our guest this week is Adam Glick, CISO, Rocket Software. Thanks to our podcast sponsor, Code42 Redefine data security standards for the hybrid workforce. Check out Code42. In this episode: Work-from-home – the joys and the sorrows What do we want the board and C-Suite to know about cybersecurity? Are you a cybersecurity or infosec hiring manager? What kind of interview questions do you ask? CISOs working with young cybersecurity entrepreneurs

All links and images for this episode can be found on CISO Series https://cisoseries.com/pushing-this-to-the-top-of-your-inbox-so-you-can-delete-it-again/ We're following up on our previous email because we love to engage in self-defeat. We assume you don't want to hear from me again, but just to make sure, I've delivered another email for you to delete. This episode is hosted by me, David Spark (@dspark), producer of CISO Series and Mike Johnson. Our guest this week is Rinki Sethi (@rinkisethi), CISO, Twitter. Thanks to our podcast sponsor, Sonatype With security concerns around software supply chains ushered to center stage in recent months, organizations around the world are turning to Sonatype as trusted advisors. The company's Nexus platform offers the only full-spectrum control of the cloud-native software development lifecycle including third-party open source code, first-party source code, infrastructure as code, and containerized code. In this episode It takes a while to hire an awesome cybersecurity team. It takes even more work to keep them. Breaches are bad, but handling them badly might be worse The unique aspects of work from anywhere security that take time to discover More of "what not to do" as a vendor pitching a cybersec prospect

All links and images for this episode can be found on CISO Series https://cisoseries.com/ok-i-get-it-youre-all-special-snowflakes/ This department manager thinks their data is the most important. But then this department manager thinks their data is the most important. Can there really be so many crown jewels in your company that are all equally important? How's a CISO supposed to prioritize? This episode is hosted by me, David Spark (@dspark), producer of CISO Series and Mike Johnson. Our guest this week is Melody Hildebrandt (@mhil1), executive vp, consumer products and engineering, and CISO, Fox Thanks to our podcast sponsor, Herjavec Group Herjavec Group excels in complex, multi-technology environments and keeps enterprise organizations secure with best of breed products and comprehensive service offerings. With 5 global Security Operations Centers, emerging technology partners, and a dedicated team of security specialists, we are well-positioned to be your organization's trusted advisor in cybersecurity. Let's connect! On this week's episode Hey, you're a CISO, what's your take? Recently, we did a Friday video chat on "Hacking the Crown Jewels" where we talked about what's really important, where it resides, and who's accessing it and when. One of the questions that came up from consultant Ian Poynter was how do you handle the conflicts from the different department leaders as to what the crown jewels are? And Jakub Kaluzny of SecuRing asked, "What's harder, identifying your crown jewels, or protecting them?" Can you change Mike's mind? Our guest, Melody Hildebrandt mentioned that as of recently she was in a pro-vendor mood Only three months into the year she has taken more new vendor meetings than in all of 2020. What changed? And can she convince Mike to do the same? "What's Worse?!" As always, this will be a surprise on the show. And no one will like the options. If you haven't made this mistake, you're not in security Even if you've configured your email security platform correctly, you can still fail early and often as our guest Melody discovered. But she actually published her findings on Tech Insiders, along with Paul Cheesbrough. Examples she provided included email account compromises that resulted in full evasion of standard email defenses. And given that her business is often an early target for new attacks, protection through threat analysis has become essentially useless. Her solution for enterprise email is to adopt an API-based solution instead of gateways, along with deep machine learning, and continuous protection of email rather than initial scanning and approval. Let's look at how difficult this shift was and how Melody is managing it. There's got to be a better way to handle this On Twitter I asked, "Since security people don't get applause when nothing happens, how do you let the rest of the company know how well the security team is doing?" One mentioned a slide on reports that says "X days without a breach" others suggested showing improvements to metrics like vulnerability and mean time to response. So what do we say to the whole company, not just the board?

All links and images for this episode can be found on CISO Series https://cisoseries.com/what-to-expect-when-youre-expecting-a-network-breach/ Are you expecting a little intrusion into your network any day now? You better be prepared. Are there some vulnerabilities you should have managed, but didn't? Don't worry, first time security professionals are always scared about their first incident. This episode is hosted by me, David Spark (@dspark), producer of CISO Series and Mike Johnson. Our sponsored guest this week is Scott Kuffer, co-founder and COO, Nucleus Security Thanks to our podcast sponsor, Nucleus Security Nucleus unifies your existing security stack, integrating with over 70 scanners and external tools, creating a centralized hub to control the chaos of vulnerability analysis, triage, and remediation. Ready to make the tedious VM process simple through smart automation and workflow optimization? See for yourself at https://nucleussec.com/demo On this week's episode There's got to be a better way to handle this We constantly hear security leaders talk about "people, process, and technology". Overwhelmingly, most security vendors are selling technology, then after a very steep drop there is the sale to managing people, and then "process" feels like a neglected stepchild. Let's talk about one process change made in the past year that had a significant impact on security posture? AND what is the "process" in security that needs the most help? Is there an opportunity in this area for security vendors or this just a combination of project management and increased automation? What do you think of this vendor marketing tactic Are security vendors eating their own dog food? The next time a security vendor pitches you, Chris Roberts of Hillbilly Hit Squad said on LinkedIn, "Ask them if they are using their own systems to protect themselves OR if they're relying on someone else's technology to protect their arses." An excellent question and HOW a vendor answers that question is very telling. So, is our sponsored guest using his own product to protect his business? "What's Worse?!" Jeremy Kempner, BT Americas offers up two really crappy communications options for Scott and Mike to wrestle with. Please, Enough. No, More. This week's topic: Risk-based vulnerability management, which can be defined as prioritizing your vulnerability remediation based on the risk it poses to your organization. What have we heard enough about with risk-based VM and what should we hear more about? How have you actually pulled this off? One of the key parts of a successful pentest is the reconnaissance phase where the necessary background information is generated. Let's walk through that process. How much involves planning vs. discovering? It's assumed that a lot of creativity goes into making a successful pentest. What are some of the techniques and information needed to increase success?

All links and images for this episode can be found on CISO Series https://cisoseries.com/we-recommend-a-know-the-right-people-certification/ There are so many fantastic certifications out there for security professionals. But we've found the one certification that will really help you land the right job really quickly, is to provide proof that you know some people at our company who can vouch for you. Remember, we are a business that operates on trust, not giving people their first chances in cybersecurity. This episode is hosted by me, David Spark (@dspark), producer of CISO Series and Mike Johnson. Our guest this week is Jesse Whaley, CISO, Amtrak Thanks to our podcast sponsor, Adaptive Shield Adaptive Shield ensures companies gain control over their SaaS app security and prevents the misconfigurations and vulnerabilities that could lead to a leak or breach. Adaptive Shield connects to any app, continuously monitors all configurations, provides a complete picture of the company's SaaS estate, and enables quick remediation of any potential threats. In this week's episode Why is everybody talking about this now? Should cybersecurity professionals fight back rather than block and tackle? former US government cyber security chief Chris Krebs, has called on law enforcement and others to fight back against ransomware attackers. Krebs, suggested posting private information of the hackers, with malicious intent, AKA doxxing. "Hacking back" is dangerous as it's hard to determine the attacker, and you're essentially taking the law into your own hands, but Chris Krebs is recommending this, seeing that ransomware is the biggest threat. Dan Lohrmann of Security Mentor shared this article from the Financial Times and it drove a lot of debate. We've heard this before, but from someone like Chris Krebs, that's astonishing. What level of fighting back should people be comfortable with? Are we having communication issues? "I push back [on vendors] because I want depth and context from first contact," said John Keenan, director of Information Security, at Memorial Hospital at Gulfport. In this post on LinkedIn he said he's annoyed with vendors' generic first outreach and when he declines their response is "Well, I had to give it a shot". If they want a real connection, include "What's In It for Me". A generic response of "I think you'll really like what we've got to show," does not qualify. Let's talk about who has ever received a first (or heck any) contact that did have depth and context and could clearly articulate the "what's in it for you" message. "What's Worse?!" This week's challenge is from Nir Rothenberg, CISO, Rapyd. How have you actually pulled this off? Hiring in cybersecurity is a bear. As we've discussed before on this show, there's actually plenty of supply and demand in cybersecurity, yet jobs are not getting filled, possibly because of unreasonable requirements. Let's talk about what percentage of all the ideal skills people are willing to accept in a new hire, and situations where someone was hired who didn't possess that must have-skill for the job. ? And also let's look at the most effective training or mentoring technique used to get employees to adopt those skills. Hey you're a CISO. What's your take? On Twitter, Alyssa Miller AKA @alyssaM_InfoSec asked: "You're the CISO, rank the priority of the following list from a security perspective and explain your reasons: A. A well-defined vulnerability management program B. A reliable configuration management database/Asset Inventory C. A comprehensive metrics and reporting practice. A slight majority voted BAC or asset management, vulnerability management, then metrics. But there was plenty of disagreement. Let's look at that.

All links and images for this episode can be found on CISO Series https://cisoseries.com/my-backup-plan-is-hoping-my-cloud-provider-has-a-backup-plan/ I think maybe I should check to see if we paid for cloud backup protection. Or maybe, we're doing it. Who knows? This episode is hosted by me, David Spark (@dspark), producer of CISO Series, and Mike Johnson. Our guest this week is Ty Sbano (@tysbano), chief security and trust officer, Sisense Thanks to our podcast sponsor, Adaptive Shield Adaptive Shield ensures companies gain control over their SaaS app security and prevents the misconfigurations and vulnerabilities that could lead to a leak or breach. Adaptive Shield connects to any app, continuously monitors all configurations, provides a complete picture of the company's SaaS estate, and enables quick remediation of any potential threats. On this week's episode Why is everybody talking about this now? Is your cloud service provider backing up your data, or should you be doing that? Many users of OVHcloud realized they should have been doing it because they didn't realize what they had bought. OVH suffered a fire that destroyed one of its data centers making some of the customer data unrecoverable. They had backup of some services, but no backups of other data. As of now, OVH is backing up all customer data for free, but this speaks to a big problem with trusting cloud providers, noted Enrico Signoretti of GigaOm in a post on LinkedIn. Did you pay for backups? How are they being provided? Where physically are they? And how often do you test restoring? Everyone knows they should do this, but how often is it actually being done? Someone has a question on the AskNetSec subreddit On the AskNetSec subreddit, the question was asked, "What's the advantage of reporting bugs to official sources over brokers?" Some really good pro and con discussions of both ranged from brokers usually pay more, to going straight to the source seems "the right thing to do." But there were so many variances that it wasn't that cut and dry. As a bug bounty hunter, if you find a significant bug, where should you go first? "What's Worse?!" Rick Woodward from Gibbs & Cox asks, "which kind of dishonesty is the worst?" Hey you're a CISO, what's your take? Another redditor on the AskNetSec subreddit asks, what kinds of questions should the interviewee ask about a company's environment so they know they're not walking into a giant mess? There were a ton of good suggested questions in the thread. If you could only ask three, which three would you ask that would give you the most information about both the stability and challenge of the security environment? What would you advise? Ross Young asked, I want to be a board advisor, how am I going to be paid? How much effort do I want to spend on this? What compensation should I expect? What do companies expect a CISO as an advisor to do? You both are advisors, so what's your experience, advice, and what have you heard from others?

All links and images for this episode can be found on CISO Series https://cisoseries.com/patches-yes-we-need-stinkin-patches/ There was a time we could trust a patch, but now our adversaries are actually looking at the patches to find even more vulnerabilities. And we keep patching those as well. Our patches' patches need patches. When does it stop?! This episode is hosted by me, David Spark (@dspark), producer of CISO Series and Mike Johnson. Our sponsored guest this week is Travis Hoyt (@travisehoyt), managing director, exec cybersecurity technology, TIAA Thanks to our podcast sponsor, Adaptive Shield Adaptive Shield ensures companies gain control over their SaaS app security and prevents the misconfigurations and vulnerabilities that could lead to a leak or breach. Adaptive Shield connects to any app, continuously monitors all configurations, provides a complete picture of the company's SaaS estate, and enables quick remediation of any potential threats. On this week's episode What's the best way to handle this The vulnerability landscape is changing, according to a new report from Rapid7. One issue, as Rob Lemos of DarkReading reports, is that you can't necessarily trust patches. They're often incomplete, and attackers look at existing patches as an opportunity to find more flaws, which they do. And the threats come from different angles: they're widespread, targeted, often using a zero-day, and there are other vulnerabilities that are impending threats. It seems that the portion of the threats you know about and can defend against is shrinking, and you're battling more of the unknown. Have you seen similar, and if so how has your security program shifted as a result? That's something I would like to avoid The NSA recently provided guidance on creating a Zero Trust security model. In the piece, the NSA says, "transitioning to a [zero trust] system requires careful planning to avoid weakening the security posture along the way." So what is the NSA talking about? What are common transitioning moves to zero trust that can make you vulnerable? "What's Worse?!" Jonathan Waldrop from Insight Global delivers a challenge specifically tailored for Mike. Please, Enough. No, More. Let's look at SaaS posture management, or just the ongoing management of potential issues that may come across SaaS platforms - and consider what we have heard enough about with regard to SaaS posture management, and what we would like to hear a lot more about. Umm is this a good idea OSINT should go beyond finding out a security practitioner's email and phone number, argued Alyssa Miller of S&P Global Ratings. Alyssa received an email pitch from a vendor offering a gift and she declined. That same vendor then followed up and called her. The vendor was pitching her something that wasn't in her department, that she had no control of, and she couldn't accept gifts because her company is in a heavily regulated market. In summary, Alyssa said if you're going to use OSINT, understand the person's business, their role, and if making such a request would be counterproductive. What types of vendor OSINT tactics work well and what types work poorly?

All links and images for this episode can be found on CISO Series https://cisoseries.com/i-think-possibly-maybe-weve-solved-diversity-in-cybersecurity/ We're tired of hearing "we're trying" when it comes to the subject of how companies are trying to inject diversity into their organizations. It's a lopsided game and diverse candidates have to make ten times the number of attempts as their non-diverse counterparts. This episode is hosted by me, David Spark (@dspark), producer of CISO Series and guest co-host Jimmy Sanders (@jfireluv), cybersecurity, Netflix DVD. Our guest this week is Jerich Beason (@blanketSec), svp, CISO, Epiq. Thanks to our podcast sponsor, Living Security Traditional approaches to security communication are limited to one-off training sessions that fail to take customers, regulators, and other external stakeholders into account and rarely affect long-term behavioral change. This report lays out a four-step plan that CISOs should follow to manage the human risk. It provides design principles for creating transformational security awareness initiatives which will win the hearts and minds of senior executives, employees, the technology organization, and customers. On this week's episode How have you actually pulled this off? As discussed before on this show, being the next CISO at a company that was recently breached can be very lucrative. We've had guests that have very successfully negotiated huge salaries as the post-breach CISO. Are CISOs setting themselves up for far too much responsibility to be seen as a the company's digital savior? What are the responsibilities of a post breach CISO? Got a better answer than "we're trying?" Over the years we have interviewed dozens of business owners, security professionals, and hiring managers about diversity. Almost all their answers fall into the following buckets: We're trying but there's no pipeline. We're working with XXX group to improve. Diversity is needed because diversity of thought it needed to create a more secure organization. No one will admittedly say they're against diversity. Yet systemic racism, sexism, or just boys' clubism in general continues to exist. It appears most of the non-diverse business leaders are being pressured into admitting it's a problem. So they do it, and we even get token hires, but it all comes off as diversity theater and not the business actually making a shift. What is the story of diversity in cybersecurity many people don't get and need to actually be doing, not just giving lip service to? "What's Worse?!" Eugene Kogan, CSO at a confidential company sets it up: Who do you want on our side: executives or employees? And now a listener drops knowledge "Learn cybersecurity in public," suggests AJ Yawn of ByteChek who recommends joining a training program and then publishing what you've learned on a blog. As AJ explains, "Doing this will help you build relationships & prove to potential employers you're applying your new knowledge." He concludes with the advice, "Don't learn in silence." The community responded to AJ's advice. It's great advice, which everyone agreed to in the comments, but why then do so few people actually do it? There's got to be a better way to handle this Zero trust is not a technology that can be purchases as a solution. It's an architecture, methodology, and framework that you have to consciously adopt, noted Stephen Lyons of F5 on a post on LinkedIn. Can solutions already in-house be rejiggered to adopt a zero trust methodology? And if so, what changes would need to be made to existing systems to have a more zero trust environment?

All links and images for this episode can be found on CISO Series https://cisoseries.com/unnecessary-research-reveals-cisos-hate-cold-calls/ In a study we never actually conducted, our fellow security leaders said unequivocally that there never has been a time they welcome a phone call from someone they don't know trying to book a demo to see a product they have no interest in. This episode is hosted by me, David Spark (@dspark), producer of CISO Series and guest co-host Andy Steingruebl (@asteingruebl), CISO, Pinterest. Our guest this week is Andy Purdy (@andy_purdy), CSO, Huawei Thanks to our podcast sponsor, Living Security Traditional approaches to security communication are limited to one-off training sessions that fail to take customers, regulators, and other external stakeholders into account and rarely affect long-term behavioral change. This report lays out a four-step plan that CISOs should follow to manage the human risk. It provides design principles for creating transformational security awareness initiatives which will win the hearts and minds of senior executives, employees, the technology organization, and customers. On this week's episode Here's some surprising research As compared to small and medium companies, big enterprises don't appear to trust the big telcos to execute their 5G strategy. This according to new research from Omdia as reported by Iain Morris of Light Reading. When asked, "do you trust a communications service provider, AKA big telco, to execute your security strategy," SMEs overwhelmingly supported the telcos over all other options, and big enterprises didn't. They trusted their own expertise or wanted to lean on a cloud service provider like Amazon or Google. Let's investigate this discrepancy. If you're not paranoid yet here's your chance As if you didn't know it already, get ready for some sobering news about third-party risk: According to a survey by BlueVoyant, as reported by SC Magazine, 80 percent of those surveyed had at least one breach caused by a third party vendor within the past year. Most of those surveyed didn't monitor third-party suppliers for cyber risk. But, even if they wanted to, it's often a point in time measurement, sometimes only yearly, and organizations have an average of 1409 vendors. UK's National Cyber Security Center puts the focus of securing against third party risk squarely on the development of the software supply chain, and the need for isolation and proven security checks throughout the development process. That may be good advice, but it still seems so overwhelming given the volume and how much you can't control. "What's Worse?!" A vulnerability response and incident detection conundrum from Jonathan Waldrop, Insight Global What's the best way to handle this Lessons learned from a big security incident and how these will be applied to the next big security incident. What do you think of this vendor marketing tactic Very few, if any, security leaders like cold calls. Yet, even with all the expressed distaste of them, they still exist, and that's probably because they still work, and still deliver significant ROI. But when these companies calculating that ROI, are they calculating all the people they've annoyed? One vendor sales rep who said after searching their CRM for "Do Not Call" there was a slew of vitriol from CISOs screaming to never contact them again. And as we all know, CISOs talk to other CISOs. So if you've angered one CISO sufficiently to never consider you, they've probably told a few friends as well. Let's discuss getting pushed over the edge by a vendor's aggressive sales tactics and what was done to essentially shut them off, including telling others about their actions.

All links and images for this episode can be found on CISO Series https://cisoseries.com/one-day-youll-grow-up-to-know-less-than-you-do-now We know so little when we're born. We're just absorbing information. But then we get older, and get the responsibility to secure the computing environment of a large company, we actually see that knowledge we absorbed start slipping away. What we thought we knew of what's in our network is so far afield from reality. This episode is hosted by me, David Spark (@dspark), producer of CISO Series and Mike Johnson. Our guest this week is Tomás Maldonado (@tomas_mald), CISO, NFL. Thanks to our podcast sponsor, Nucleus Security Nucleus unifies your existing security stack, integrating with over 70 scanners and external tools, creating a centralized hub to control the chaos of vulnerability analysis, triage, and remediation. Ready to make the tedious VM process simple through smart automation and workflow optimization? See for yourself at https://nucleussec.com/demo It's time to measure the risk Outside of security basics and popular controls like SSO, MFA, and password management, what are the most effective means (or security control) to reduce risk? People have been offering some great suggestions on LinkedIn such as reducing attack surface, knowing what you're protecting, education, more conversations about risk, and actually having someone in charge of security and risk. All reduce risk, but what truly gives the biggest bang for the buck in terms of risk reduction? Are we making this situation better or worse? When things break, what's the best tactic to remediation? A bigger/better version of the last thing, or critical thinking? Both actually have serious costs associated to them. The first being equipment and maintenance, and the second having the talent that's able to think of unique and innovative soluitons. In a post on LinkedIn, Greg van der Gaast of cmcg argues that bigger walls just result in continued security problems at a more expensive, yet slower rate. He argues many issues could be avoided with critical examination, especially in IT. It's time to play, "What's Worse?!" Ross Young asks how badly do you need to measure your security program. How would you handle this situation? Our guest, Tomás Maldonado, describes what's unique about being a CISO for the NFL - the specific security concerns that aren't necessarily on the radar at his previous organizations, and the security issues around huge global events like the Super Bowl. Well that didn't work out the way we expected Perception vs. reality in security. On LinkedIn, Ross Young, CISO at Caterpillar Financial Services said, "In April 2018, McAfee published a survey asking 1,400 IT professionals to estimate the number of cloud services in use within their organization. The average response was 31, with only 2% of respondents believing that they had more than 80—yet the real average is 1,935." This supports the great need of asset inventory. There are many instances CISOs have to make an estimate of what they have given the best information. We look at examples of when the reality of a situation was far from the initial perception, and how to manage this.

All links and images for this episode can be found on CISO Series https://cisoseries.com/would-you-look-at-that-unrealistic-licensing-deal/ CISOs know that salespeople want to make the best licensing deal they can possibly get. But unpredictability in the world of cybersecurity makes one-year licensing deals tough, and three-year licensing deals impossible. This episode is hosted by David Spark (@dspark), producer of CISO Series and Mike Johnson. Our guest this week is Mark Eggleston, (@meggleston) CISO, Health Partners Plans. This recording was recorded live in front of a virtual audience at the "SecTalks - Leading with grit in security" virtual conference brought to you by our sponsor, Cobalt. Thanks to our podcast sponsor, Cobalt Cobalt offers a faster more effective pentesting solution through its Pentest as a Service (PtaaS) platform. With it, you can schedule a pentest in as little as 24 hours for all kinds of assets. The platform also connects you with a global pool of pentesters called the Cobalt Core, whose skills can match what you need. And instead of sending you a huge PDF that raises more questions you can't answer, they engage with your team throughout the pentest. Findings can land straight into Jira and GitHub, helping you fix vulnerabilities as soon as they're discovered. Cobalt makes pentesting easy, quick to deploy, scalable, and simple to remediate. On this week's episode Why is everybody talking about this now? A redditor is struggling and overwhelmed! The person is in school studying, working, and loving cybersecurity, but has completely and utterly failed the foundations course and is on academic probation. The person told their story to the cybersecurity subreddit community, and the support came out in droves. We've seen this before. People hit a major wall professionally and they just reach out to the anonymous masses for support. The story hits a nerve and the community is eager to show encouragement. In fact, just this past week, the New York Times had an article about the unemployment subreddit offering advice and information to those struggling. We'll take a look at this tactic of reaching out for support and guidance through discussion boards. What do you think of this vendor marketing tactic? "Pro tip to vendors: don't claim that you can't do a one-year licensing deal. You might end up with a zero-year license deal", said Ian Amit, CSO, Cimpress on LinkedIn. We'll look at the art of negotiating a contract with a vendor: What is it ultimately you want? What are you willing to concede on and what must you have? And what are the situations that cause this to change? It's time to play, "What's Worse?!" Jason Dance of Greenwich Associates suggests two scenarios that others believe is security, but actually isn't. If you haven't made this mistake, you're not in security On Twitter, the CISO of Twitter, Rinki Sethi, said, "A career mistake I made, I rolled out a phishing testing program before the company was ready for it. The HR team said it was against the company culture and if I tried a trick like that again, I would be fired. Lesson - communication is important in #cybersecurity." Rinki asked for others' stories of failure. Let's explore a few. What Is It and Why Do I Care? For this week's game, the topic is vulnerability management. We look at four pitches from four different vendors. Contestants must first answer what "vulnerability management" is in 25 words or less, and secondly must explain what's unique about their vulnerability management solution. These are based on actual pitches - company names and individual identities are hidden. The winners will be revealed at the end.

All links and images for this episode can be found on CISO Series https://cisoseries.com/this-is-the-year-im-going-to-lose-weight-and-care-about-security/ Every year I say I'm going to do it. I'm going to get healthy and be much better about securing my digital identity and my data. But then after about two weeks I give up, use the same password across multiple accounts, and eat a pint of Häagen-Dazs. This episode is hosted by me, David Spark (@dspark), producer of CISO Series and guest co-host Dan Walsh, CISO, VillageMD. Our sponsored guest this week is Drew Rose, (@livsecaware)CSO, Living Security Thanks to our podcast sponsor, Living Security Traditional approaches to security communication are limited to one-off training sessions that fail to take customers, regulators, and other external stakeholders into account and rarely affect long-term behavioral change. This report lays out a four-step plan that CISOs should follow to manage the human risk. It provides design principles for creating transformational security awareness initiatives which will win the hearts and minds of senior executives, employees, the technology organization, and customers. On this week's episode What would you advise? Over on the AskNetSec subreddit, a pentester wants out. The redditor is looking for exit opportunities into another job in cybersecurity. Other redditors suggested IT audit, SOC operations, incident response, forensics. What would be an ideal next step for a pentester? We don't have much time. What's your decision? What happens when a previous employer of yours gets hacked and your information is potentially stolen. This happened to a redditor who asked this question on the cybersecurity subreddit. If nothing has actually happened, what can they do and what can potentially happen? Is a warning of "I may be compromised" to anyone going to do anything? "What's Worse?!" Jason Dance of Greenwich Associates delivers a really annoying "What's Worse?!" scenario. Please, Enough. No, More. The topic is "Security Awareness Training". David prefaces this with a top finding from a Forrester report that said, "Unless You Capture Hearts And Minds, No Amount Of Training Will Work". So with that said, what have people heard enough about with regard to security awareness training and what would they like to hear a lot more? Pay attention. It's security awareness training time What if security behavior was rated as a performance score, suggested Ashish Paliwal of SONY. In his LinkedIn article, he agreed you can't train yourself to better security. It requires positive reinforcement. He suggested psychometric tests and a scoring system where you would gain points for good security behavior and lose points for bad security behavior (-10 for clicking on a phish, +10 for reporting). Creative ideas that he acknowledges have lots of challenges. The focus here is changing human behavior, possible the hardest feature to implement. What user experience does change behavior? And why would or why wouldn't Ashish's suggestions work?

All links and images for this episode can be found on CISO Series https://cisoseries.com/please-accept-this-not-a-bribe-gift-as-an-act-of-desperation/ Offering me a gift for a meeting was definitely not Plan A. Or was this a situation that you ran out of creative ideas and it's actually more cost efficient to buy your way into meeting with me? This episode is hosted by me, David Spark (@dspark), producer of CISO Series and Mike Johnson. Our guest this week is John Overbaugh, (@johnoverbaugh) vp, security, CareCentrix. Thanks to our podcast sponsor, Nucleus Security Nucleus unifies your existing security stack, integrating with over 70 scanners and external tools, creating a centralized hub to control the chaos of vulnerability analysis, triage, and remediation. Ready to make the tedious VM process simple through smart automation and workflow optimization? See for yourself at https://nucleussec.com/demo. On this week's episode OK, what's the risk? People hear all too often that risk security isn't compliant security and vice versa, but isn't compliance just another form of risk? Shouldn't it be given quantitative and qualitative ratings like any other risk, prioritized, and remediated especially in highly regulated environments? Why is everyone talking about this now? On LinkedIn, LinkedIn CISO, Geoff Belknap asked, "Tech Vendors: Please, stop offering cash or gift cards for meetings. It throws into question the entire basis for a relationship and It's not ethical." Vendors take CISOs out for lunch all the time. That is a form of a gift. One vendor said because they can't take a CISO out they send a Starbucks card in lieu of the coffee they were going to purchase. Then there are the gifts that arrive for attending an event. Edward Kiledjian at OpenText, said, "I recently had a vendor get upset with me that I wasn't willing to accept his gifts. He said others in my position accept it and he couldn't understand why I was being so 'stubborn.'" How should this situation be handled and does a CISO's opinion of the vendor change as a result? "What's Worse?!" David tried to second guess Mike and was wrong on this bad idea from Jesse Whaley, CISO, Amtrak. If you haven't made this mistake you're not in security When Zero Day bugs arrive, security flaws just keep perpetuating. Garrett Moreau of Augury IT posted an article from MIT Technology Review about Google's research finding that when patches are released for zero days, they're often incomplete. Hackers can actually find the vulnerability sitting on the next line of code right next to the patched line of code, making it very easy for a hacker to reignite the zero day vulnerability. How can this problem stop perpetuating itself? Someone has a question on the cybersecurity subreddit A frustrated redditor eager to learn cybersecurity is getting stuck on CTFs (Capture the Flags ) and is losing the motivation as a result. The person is worried that relying on walkthroughs will be harmful. Responses from the reddit community were that the walkthroughs are there to help people learn, and that most CTFs don't resemble real life. They're there to teach a few tricks. So, is that the case?

All links and images for this episode can be found on CISO Series https://cisoseries.com/foul-that-interview-question-is-unfair/ Pick a side. You either want your employees to have a work/life balance, or you want them to be obsessed with security 24/7. You can't have both. This episode is hosted by me, David Spark (@dspark), producer of CISO Series and Mike Johnson. Our guest this week is Arpita Biswas, (@0sn1s) senior incident response engineer, Databricks Thanks to our podcast sponsor, StackRox StackRox is the industry's first Kubernetes-native security platform that enables organizations to securely build, deploy, and run cloud-native applications anywhere. The StackRox Kubernetes Security Platform delivers lower operational cost, reduced operational risk, and greater developer productivity through a Kubernetes-native approach that supports built-in security across the entire software development lifecycle. What would you advise? People speak a lot about the importance of integrating security and DevOps. Now it's time to learn some specifics, like how to energize developers to be more security minded in their development. What works? What hasn't worked? "What's Worse?!" You just learned something was breached. Uggh. (Thanks to Mike Toole, Censys) What's the best way to handle this ? What questions should be asked to see if a security team is cloud incident ready? A good article over on F5 by Sara Boddy, Raymond Pompon, and Sander Vinberg, provides some suggestions such as "Can you describe our attack surface and how have you reduced it to the bare minimum?" and "How are we managing access control?" and "What do we do when systems or security controls fail?" Which of the questions is the most revealing to cloud security readiness and why? Should you ignore this security advice? On the AskNetSec subreddit someone inquired about a good hiring question. One redditor suggested asking "What do you do on your own home network with respect to security?" to which another redditor argued that the question was unfair. He left the security and networking for work. He had other hobbies and interests for home life. Another person said, yes it is unfair, but there are plenty of candidates who do breathe security 24/7 and if given a choice, the redditor would take that person. The politically correct thing to say is you want the person with the work-life balance, but wouldn't we be more impressed with the person who has security in their blood day and night? Close your eyes and visualize the perfect engagement Another question on AskNetSec subreddit asked "What are the most important skills you see missing among other coworkers or your team?" The two most common answers I saw on the thread were communications and critical thinking. Are these correct. or should something else go there? ? And if those two did improve, what would be the resulting effect to a company's security program?

All links and images for this episode can be found on CISO Series (https://cisoseries.com/why-do-we-fire-the-ciso-tradition/) Yes, firing the CISO probably won't solve our security issues. But our community has a multi-generational heritage of relying on scapegoats to make them feel good about their decisions. This episode is hosted by me, David Spark (@dspark), producer of CISO Series and Mike Johnson. Our guest this week is Kirsten Davies (@kirstendiva), CISO, Estee Lauder Companies. Thanks to our podcast sponsor, Kenna Security With Kenna Security, companies efficiently manage the right level of risk for their business. Our Modern Vulnerability Management model eliminates the friction between Security and IT teams about what to patch, providing clear prioritization based on real-time threat intelligence and guidance applied to each customer's unique environment across infrastructure, applications and IoT. Why is everybody talking about this now? On the AskNetSec subreddit one redditor asked, "Why do people always get fired over a breach?" to which one responded, like many others, "it's just tradition. Military, government, corporations. It's an old-fashioned thing really, but a lot of people still believe a 'blood sacrifice' is required to restore faith from the public or the shareholders." How tenable is it to keep doing this with so many breaches? After a breach what are the different actions needed to appease shareholders, executives, employees, and customers? And when is blood letting warranted? How to become a CISO Over on the CISOseries subreddit, a hopefully soon-to-be-CISO asked, "What should I ask before being a CISO at a startup?" This startup is pre-IPO. 2000 employees. About $1B in valuation. The redditor is looking for advice beyond asking what's the current security strategy and what the reporting structure would look like. What would you want to ask in such a situation? "What's Worse?!" Probably the ultimate "What's Worse?!" scenario. Hey you're a CISO. What's your take? On LinkedIn, Kris Rides asked, "If you can only do one thing to retain your staff what would that be?" What have you done and has any of your staff let you know that certain actions you took meant a lot to them. According to research from leadership consulting firm DDI, 57 percent of employees who walk out the door, do so because they can't stand their boss. For that reason, the pressure is heavily on the CISO to make sure they're well-liked by their staff. There's got to be a better way to handle this Can you think of a moment you had to make a significant shift in your security program? What did you do and why? Was there a specific event that triggered it?

All links and images for this episode can be found on CISO Series (https://cisoseries.com/click-this-link-to-fail-a-phishing-test/) Our phishing tests are designed to make you feel bad about yourself for clicking a link. We're starting to realize these tests are revealing how insensitive we are towards our employees. This episode is hosted by me, David Spark (@dspark), producer of CISO Series and Mike Johnson. Our guest this week is Yaron Levi, (@0xL3v1) former CISO, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Kansas City. Thanks to this week's podcast sponsor, Stackrox StackRox is the industry's first Kubernetes-native security platform that enables organizations to securely build, deploy, and run cloud-native applications anywhere. The StackRox Kubernetes Security Platform delivers lower operational cost, reduced operational risk, and greater developer productivity through a Kubernetes-native approach that supports built-in security across the entire software development lifecycle. Is this a cybersecurity disinformation campaign? On reddit, an explosive discussion formed around a ComputerWeekly.com article by Saj Huq of Plexal about the importance of making disinformation a security issue. The problem though has primarily fallen into the hands of social media companies mostly because that's where disinformation spreads. While we've seen disinformation being used as a political tool, for businesses, it can tarnish your corporate brand, consumer trust, and ultimately the value of your product. It's also used in phishing campaigns. Breaches are compromising your data. Disinformation is questioning the validity and value of data without even stealing it. How do you combat that? Are we having communication issues? We're recording this episode shortly after GoDaddy sent its infamous phishing test email that promised employees a $650 bonus check. Those who clicked on the email were rewarded with additional security training. It took the entire Internet to point out how insensitive this was, GoDaddy's response was "We understand some employees were upset by the phishing attempt and felt it was insensitive, for which we have apologized." They argued that while it may be insensitive, these types of well-timed phishing emails do happen. A lot of people do not like phishing tests and Yaron has proven that if creative enough, anyone can fall for a phish. How can the company and security be more sensitive to employees, respect them, while also letting them know they may receive a malicious email just like this? "What's Worse?!" An international What's Worse conundrum. How do you go about discovering new security solutions? Julia Wool, Evolve Security said, "I just finished a Splunk course and wanted to explore other SIEM platforms and I am having a difficult time understanding how an enterprise should choose a vendor in this space. I couldn't imagine being the guy at an enterprise that has to consider all these different vendors that seem to be doing the same thing." Julia brings up a really good concern: If you were completely green, didn't have CISO connections, and were going to choose a SIEM for the first time how would you go about determining your needs and then researching and deciding? What sources would you use? And how do you limit this effort so you're not overwhelmed? There's got to be a better way to handle this Brian Fanny, Orbita, asks, "Vendor scope can change over time within a project or the start of another and harder to control than the initial evaluations. They start off when non-critical requirements/needs eventually grow into handing assets of greater value and/or gaining access to more critical systems. How do you keep up with vendor/project scope creep from the security sidelines?"

All links and images for this episode can be found on CISO Series https://cisoseries.com/our-hope-it-doesnt-happen-to-me-security-strategy/ We're thinking it just might be possible to wish our security problems away. This episode is hosted by me, David Spark (@dspark), producer of CISO Series and Mike Johnson. Our sponsored guest this week is Steve Giguere, (@_SteveGiguere_) director of solution architecture and community, StackRox. Thanks to this week's podcast sponsor, Stackrox StackRox is the industry's first Kubernetes-native security platform that enables organizations to securely build, deploy, and run cloud-native applications anywhere. The StackRox Kubernetes Security Platform delivers lower operational cost, reduced operational risk, and greater developer productivity through a Kubernetes-native approach that supports built-in security across the entire software development lifecycle. On this week's episode That's something I would like to avoid Security theater is a security placebo. We're being told that it's effective, and we may fool ourselves into believing it is, but the reality is there's no real security medicine there. Over on Infosecurity Magazine, Danny Bradbury has identified a few key ones I want to call out. In particular, technology buzzwords - like getting a solution with AI, data collection - more data, more insights, right?, and endless security alerts - for practitioners and end users. All of these seem to be in regular practice today. Does calling out security theater result in pushback? And if so, how do you handle calling it out and how would you shift each of these security placebos into a more medicated version? There's got to be a better way to handle this On reddit, kautica0 asks, "If a company becomes aware of a 0-day vulnerability and it impacts their production web application serving customers, what actions should be taken? Should it even be considered an incident?" Just because it's a 0-day vulnerability does that make it more threatening than any of the known vulnerabilities? There was a lot of logical advice that was akin to how we would handle any vulnerability, but the 0-day nature had the looming feeling of this could be an incident very quickly and would require an incident response plan. "What's Worse?!" A "What's Worse?!" entry from our youngest listener. Please, enough. No, more. The topic is Kubernetes Security. We discuss what we have heard enough about when it comes to Kubernetes security and what we would like to hear more. Where does a CISO begin Is being cloud first a security strategy? Over on the UK's National Cyber Security Centre, an article argues that we should not ask if the cloud is secure, but whether it is being used securely. What does that mean? And is there an argument for and against cloud first being a valid security strategy?

All links and images for this episode can be found on CISO Series (https://cisoseries.com/hey-reseller-whats-the-value-youre-adding/) It seems that you're offering so much more when you add the VA ("value added") in front of your title. What is that? Why am I working with you rather than buying directly from the vendor? This episode is hosted by me, David Spark (@dspark), producer of CISO Series and Mike Johnson. Our guest this week is Doug Cahill (@dougcahill), vp, and group director, cybersecurity, Enterprise Strategy Group. Thanks to this week's podcast sponsor, Dtex Traditional Employee Monitoring solutions are creepy. Capturing screenshots, recording keystrokes, monitoring web browsing and following social media activities is unnecessary and damages culture. DTEX InTERCEPT is the first and only solution that delivers the real-time workforce monitoring capabilities today's organizations need and employees will embrace. Learn more at dtexsystems.com. On this week's episode How a security vendor helped me this week From Trevor Marcatte, The SCE Group, asks a question about the "value added reseller" or VAR vs. the "large account reseller" or LAR. I'm paraphrasing, but Trevor wants to know what we're seeing as the value of this middleman. Trevor said, "Being the middle man is tough and battling the big guys is tough. CDW's, SHI's of the world. The smaller guys have so much more to offer than a price. Price is dictated by the vendor anyways." What do the smaller VARs have to offer that the larger LARs can't offer? How do you go about discovering new security solutions How do we evaluate DevSecOps solutions? Mike hates the term, so I'll say how do we evaluate solutions that will improve the security of the DevOps pipeline? GigaOM Research has a report where they evaluate these solutions, but they also have another report that goes into detail on evaluation criteria. There is a lot of criteria such as seamless integration into tools, process, and dashboards, plus role-based access controls, automation driven by policy, management of secrets, and dependency analysis. What criteria do we look at? How does it change from company to company? And how do we supplement when a solution looks great, but misses a key criteria? "What's Worse?!" A question about DevSecOps. What's the best way to handle this? Is cloud identity management going to stick? According to David Vellante over at Wikibon and The Cube, the pandemic has forced that shift for everyone and there's probably no turning back. For cloud-first companies this was business as usual before the pandemic. But what about all the new businesses that are going to the cloud and doing business with you. It's a very broad field and there are a lot of industry players, so actually skip the obvious stuff and just mention the items that have become sticking points or are still in need of development. Is this the best solution The "X" in XDR extends traditional endpoint detection and response or EDR to also include network and cloud sensors. We talked about this on our other podcast, Defense in Depth, and one of the issues came up was the disruptive nature of XDR. How much was real. David Thomas, Computacenter, said, "The aspiration to get fully integrated insights of all your tools and create the ultimate feedback loop responsive system is a worthy aim... Current vendor XDR pitches are up selling opportunities but customers have a challenge to adopt or shift to a single vendor platform due to a vast array of displace/replace challenges. It's a great marketing story but the pragmatic reality is it's a tough and long journey to realise the platform / single (pain) pane promise, unless you are a greenfield organisation." Is XDR a worthy goal and what is the marketing hype buyers should question?

All links and images for this episode can be found on CISO Series (https://cisoseries.com/the-people-closest-to-you-will-hurt-you/) Insider threats. We know some are malicious, and sometimes it's the unwitting result of someone trying to do their job. Aren't you supposed to trust the people you hire? This episode is hosted by me, David Spark (@dspark), producer of CISO Series and Mike Johnson. Our sponsored guest this week is Dr. Deanna Caputo, chief scientist for behavioral sciences and cyber security capabilities, senior principal behavioral psychologist for MITRE. Thanks to our sponsor, Dtex. Traditional Employee Monitoring solutions are creepy. Capturing screenshots, recording keystrokes, monitoring web browsing and following social media activities is unnecessary and damages culture. DTEX InTERCEPT is the first and only solution that delivers the real-time workforce monitoring capabilities today's organizations need and employees will embrace. Learn more at dtexsystems.com. On this week's episode What we've got here is failure to communicate Breaking News! The cybersecurity skills shortage is growing. The ISSA and Enterprise Strategy Group released a report claiming the reason that 70 percent of companies feel that they're at risk is because of the increased workload for cyber professionals, unfilled open job requisitions, and poor education on the relevant technologies. This discussion appeared on the cybersecurity subreddit and complaints ranged from entry level jobs asking for 3+ years experience (something we've discussed many times before), and people with many more years of experience struggling to find a job. Others who were contemplating entering cybersecurity said the discussion was turning them off from entering the field. There's supply and demand, yet there's frustration on both ends. Why aren't they connecting? What's going on?" Are we making this situation better or worse? What defines "usable security". We've discussed obvious things like trying to make it invisible to the user and just basic user experience. But what's unique to cybersecurity design that many don't consider when creating usable security. For example, for phishing there are an endless number of email programs AND we have lots of security awareness training. Could we do away with the awareness training if security was more usable? What's Worse?! Insider threats are no fun, but which one is the worst? Please, Enough. No, More. Topic is Insider Threats. What have we heard enough about with insider threats, and what would we like to hear a lot more? There's got to be a better way to handle this What do you do after you get the certification? What are the next steps? Mo Shami reached out to me and mentioned that he was going to announce that he passed his CISSP or Certified Information Systems Security Professional exam. He wanted to share the excitement and I said when you post to LinkedIn ask everyone else what they did right after they passed. Most people ended up just saying congratulations, but a couple suggested more certifications or just research job openings (seems obvious). What should one do after you get the certification?

All links and images for this episode can be found on CISO Series (https://cisoseries.com/when-should-you-stop-trusting-your-ciso/) How technically capable does my CISO need to be? If they lose their technical chops, should we stop trusting them? Should they even be a CISO if they had no technical chops to begin with? This episode is hosted by me, David Spark (@dspark), producer of CISO Series and Mike Johnson. Our guest this week is James Dolph, CISO for Guidewire Software. Thanks to our sponsor, Dtex. Traditional Employee Monitoring solutions are creepy. Capturing screenshots, recording keystrokes, monitoring web browsing and following social media activities is unnecessary and damages culture. DTEX InTERCEPT is the first and only solution that delivers the real-time workforce monitoring capabilities today's organizations need and employees will embrace. Learn more at dtexsystems.com. On this week's episode We mentioned past guest, Kelly Shortridge's new book with Aaron Rinehart, "Security Chaos Engineering". First 90 days of a CISO It's time for a CISO do-over. One of the great things about being a CISO is you get a chance to actually apply everything you learned from past jobs. Our guest, James, worked in product security with Salesforce before becoming a CISO. When we recorded the episode, James wasn't yet a full 90 days into his job. And Mike also came from Salesforce as well (they worked together) and working at Lyft was his first CISO job directly from Salesforce as well. Did they both have the same viewpoints of applying product security principles to the CISO role? How do you go about discovering new security solutions What criteria do you use to evaluate phishing solutions? GigaOM Research released a report earlier this year of the key criteria for evaluating phishing platforms. Some of the criteria they mentioned were phishing solutions that do and do not impede workflows, a security edge solution that's in-band vs. out-of-band, and do you need detonation chambers for potentially malicious emails. What criteria do Mike and James use to evaluate, and have they seen those criteria change from company to company? What criteria are not as important? What's Worse?! Failing as a professional or being a mediocre professional? What's a CISO to do On Defense in Depth, my co-host Allan Alford said, "I think the lack of technical skills in a CISO is expected to a certain degree. You have to have the foundation, but I don't expect my CISOs to be rolling up their sleeves and doing a lot of the hands on work." I turned that quote into a meme image and it caused a flurry of response from the community. How much of applying of security controls that your staff currently does, could a CISO do themselves today? Let's dig a little deeper What are our passion projects that are tangentially related to cybersecurity? Are we adopting any and how is it helping us stay mentally healthy during COVID? Tony Jarvis of Check Point brought this up. He suggested that we should be sharing our passion projects. What have been our passion projects? How have they helped our mood and our work? And have we been able to keep up with them?

All links and images for this episode can be found on CISO Series (https://cisoseries.com/why-is-pay-the-ransom-in-next-years-budget/) With 25 percent of ransomware victims paying the ransomware, have we waved the white flag to the attackers? Should we just budget for it? This week's episode is hosted by me, David Spark (@dspark), producer of CISO Series and founder of Spark Media Solutions and Mike Johnson. Our guest is Les McCollum (@doinmorewithles), managing vp, CISO, ICMA-RC. Thanks to our sponsor, BitSight. BitSight is the most widely used Security Ratings service with a mission to change the way the world addresses cyber risk. Learn how BitSight for Third-Party Risk Management helps you efficiently mitigate the growing risk across your vendor ecosystem by taking an automated, data-driven approach. On this week's episode Why is everybody talking about this now Are culture fit and diversity mutually exclusive? Allan Alford, co-host of Defense in Depth podcast, brought up the conversation of needing diversity in all areas: age, gender, ethnicity, city vs. country, country of origin, military vs. civilian, college educated vs. self-taught, socioeconomic status, and disabilities. But at the same time, I'm thinking we NEVER see those types of groups hanging out together or getting along. So how do you create a culturally sane group among such a diverse group? People are tribal by nature and even if you're successful creating diversity on your team they're going to bond with people of similar types. Won't this introduce new problems? If you haven't made this mistake you're not in security At the end of the year when you look at your security budget, what are the costs you didn't expect or budget appropriately at the beginning of the year? On CSO Online, John Edwards has an article about seven overlooked cybersecurity costs that may bust your budget. He mentioned items such as staff acquisition and retention, incident response, third-party analysis, and replacement costs. What has been a surprise for you and has adjusting things for the next year helped, or is there always a surprise? Which is the one everyone should prepare for but they don't? More bad security advice Over a quarter of companies that fall victim to ransomware, pay the ransom, according to a study by Crowdstrike. In a discussion thread on reddit, user yourdigitalmind said they had a client who remarked, "WHEN we get hit, it will force us to start doing things right, but right now, it's cheaper'" So he's accepted being hit by ransomware is inevitable. That falls in line with Crowdstrike's study that found after a ransomware attack 75 percent of the victims do increase their security spend on tools and hiring. Humor for me a moment. Most of us do not want to pay the ransom, but sometimes you can't think of the greater good and you have to think of the survival of the business. Is this where I should put my marketing dollars? What types of vendor stories do you respond to? I bring this up because Mike O'Toole, president of PJA Advertising wrote a great piece about how to build a cybersecurity brand story. In the article, he offers up some really good advice such as "Position yourself against the category, not just your direct competitors," "Fear gets attention, but opportunity can drive purchase behavior," and "The strongest brand stories are about market change." Which advice most resonates with how you're pitched, and can you think of either a customer story or offering that you overheard that pushed you into exploring a vendor's solution?

All links and images for this episode can be found on CISO Series (https://cisoseries.com/were-90-confident-weve-lost-all-confidence/) I don't think we're doing enough to protect ourselves against cyberattacks and I'm also pretty sure we're clueless as to what our third party vendors are doing. This week's episode is hosted by me, David Spark (@dspark), producer of CISO Series and founder of Spark Media Solutions and Mike Johnson. Our sponsored guest is Stephen Boyer (@swboyer), co-founder and CTO, BitSight. Thanks to our sponsor, BitSight. BitSight is the most widely used Security Ratings service with a mission to change the way the world addresses cyber risk. Learn how BitSight for Third-Party Risk Management helps you efficiently mitigate the growing risk across your vendor ecosystem by taking an automated, data-driven approach. On this week's episode There's got to be a better way to handle this How confident are your employees in your cybersecurity efforts? And how does employee confidence affect corporate security? Tip of the hat to Tor Swanson of Premier IT for posting this survey from Nulab. The survey found that employees felt that their company's ability to secure digital data was a major to moderate problem. That percentage jumped up dramatically for companies with less than 100 employees. In addition, employees don't feel they're being heard with their cybersecurity concerns. For companies with less than 50 employees, 44 percent felt their employers were slightly or not at all responsive. Perception is a huge part of successful cybersecurity. If you were to let these perceptions continue, how does it affect your overall security program? Question for the board Ross Young, CISO, Caterpillar Financial Services asked, "What are the cyber metrics that should be reported to the board each month or quarter? Is this standardized (example does the financial industry say we want these five metrics), and where would you go to see how you benchmark against the industry?" I'll skip to one important metric we've mentioned on this show multiple times and that's "dwell time" or the time between an incident happening, discovering it, and then remediating it. How do you go about finding benchmarks, and what other metrics tell a good story to the board so they can better wrap their heads around the security program's effectiveness? What's Worse?! Third party issues? We've got 'em. Please, Enough. No, More. Topic is third party risk management. What have we heard enough about third party risk management, and what would we like to hear a lot more? Close your eyes and visualize the perfect engagement We're all getting bombarded with virtual events. Interested to know what virtual events have you attended that you've really enjoyed. Also, what virtual events are the most engaging where you find yourself NOT multi-tasking while watching. Plus, what does a virtual event need to offer for you to take time out in your day to attend?

All links and images for this episode can be found on CISO Series (https://cisoseries.com/networks-wobble-but-they-dont-fall-down/) Eager cyberprofessional looking to really impress a CISO? Create a home network lab and show how you can handle incidents on that network without shutting it down. This week's episode is hosted by me, David Spark (@dspark), producer of CISO Series and founder of Spark Media Solutions and Mike Johnson. Our guest is Steve Zalewski, deputy CISO, Levi Strauss. Thanks to our sponsor, BitSight. BitSight is the most widely used Security Ratings service with a mission to change the way the world addresses cyber risk. Learn how BitSight for Third-Party Risk Management helps you efficiently mitigate the growing risk across your vendor ecosystem by taking an automated, data-driven approach. On this week's episode Why is everybody talking about this now Following the horrible terrorist attack in Vienna, the EU has proposed a ban on encryption, requiring companies like WhatsApp and Signal to provide backdoor keys to decipher their end-to-end encryption. It's questionable whether this attack could have been thwarted had the data they couldn't see been read, but regardless, it appears this ban is going to be approved. As you might imagine, the cybersecurity community blew up... on reddit. This is obviously a complicated and thorny issue. What's at play here are authorities being blocked from doing their job because of technology. The loss of human life. And the loss of democratized privacy. Are there any checks and balances that can provide some benefit to any side of this equation? What would you advise? On a previous episode Mike mentioned that if you're an aspiring cybersecurity professional, one way to really impress a CISO is to setup a network and show how you can deal with incidents without taking down the network. I get Mike to talk specifics of that. What if he was in the shoes of that aspiring cyberprofessional. If he were to set one up, what would it have on it and how would he do it? "What's Worse?!" Do you need experience or communications? Close your eyes and visualize the perfect engagement On CSO Online, Jaikumar Vijayan wrote a best practices guide to negotiating SaaS contracts for risk and security. It's a good primer. He mentioned know your risks, state what's non-negotiable, insist on early breach notifications, and be clear on terms for termination. What is the most important concern when negotiating a SaaS contract, and what has been the most difficult to manage? "What Is It and Why Do I Care?" The panoply of security products is very confusing. There are so many product categories and then there are so many companies delivering solutions for all these categories. As a security vendor, how do you know if your pitch is landing with CISOs? That's why we play "What Is It and Why Do I Care?" I ask vendor listeners to submit to our game which you can find under the Participate menu option and then "Challenge Us". Today's category is penetration testing. We have four challengers. First, I will read four 25-word descriptions from four unnamed security vendors. That's our "What Is It?". Then I will read four 25-word differentiators from the same unnamed vendors. That's the "Why Do I Care?" It's up to our CISOs to pick their favorite. At the end I will announce the winners, and only the winners. Losers are not announced. YES, it's the only risk-free opportunity in cybersecurity. Ready to play? Submit your pitches to "What Is It and Why Do I Care?" I'm looking for vendors in the following categories to submit: Data loss prevention, human-layer security, MSSPs, third party vendor assessment, and managed detection and response.

All links and images for this episode can be found on CISO Series (https://cisoseries.com/why-dont-cybercriminals-attack-when-its-convenient-for-me/) Hey cybercrooks, I've got a really great weekend planned, so could you do us all a favor and cool it this Friday and just let all of us enjoy the weekend? This week's episode is hosted by me, David Spark (@dspark), producer of CISO Series and founder of Spark Media Solutions and Mike Johnson. Our guest is Margarita Rivera, vp of information security, LMC. Thanks to our sponsor, Netskope. The Netskope security cloud provides unrivaled visibility and real-time data and threat protection when accessing cloud services, websites, and private apps from anywhere, on any device. Only Netskope understands the cloud and takes a data-centric approach that empowers security teams with the right balance of protection and speed they need to secure their digital transformation journey. On this week's episode Is this the best solution? Geoff Belknap, CISO, LinkedIn asks, "If you could only buy one off the shelf security tool / product. What would it be and why?" Here's some surprising research We've discussed a lot of how COVID is changing security. Well Eli Migdal, CEO of Boardish sent me some interesting research his company conducted regarding the last six months since the start of COVID. According to Boardish's report the top three threats now are: Immobility (not being able to work remotely) Ransomware Accidental Sharing And the top 3 solutions now are: User Awareness training Remote conferencing IAM (identity access management) Solutions Does this track with your current threats and solutions? What's Worse?! Two guaranteed bad things will happen. But one will cost far more damage. Which one? Pay attention. It's security awareness training time. Jackson Muhiwre, deputy CISO at UC Davis said his cyber team "Are now extra vigilant on Fridays or call it the new Monday for cyber folks." The reason for this increased awareness is the number of cyber incidents that happen on a Friday or just before a holiday seems to go up. Past cyber incidents seem to show that pattern said Muhiwre who believes that malicious hackers know that users have their guard down at these times and it's the easiest time to attack. Are our CISOs of similar thinking and if so how do they prepare/warn/keep staff vigilant? What can be done on top of your existing protections if your staff lets its guard down? What's the best way to handle this? On LinkedIn, Caitlin Oriel, wrote a very emotional post about her being unemployed for six months and how the non-stop stream of rejection has become overwhelming. The community response was equally overwhelming with nearly 80,000 reactions and 7,500 comments. Caitlin works in tech, not cyber, but the post was universal. The feelings she expressed about being rejected continuously and ghosted by companies left her sobbing in her car. All of this rejection made her question if she's doing the right thing and where she belongs. I have been in this position myself, as have my friends and family. I wish I knew the right things to say to someone or how to keep them moving. What are positive ways to combat ongoing rejection and get a sense you're still heading in the right direction?

All links and images for this episode can be found on CISO Series (https://cisoseries.com/archaeologists-dig-up-the-remains-of-an-optimistic-ciso/) It it believed that in ancient times cybersecurity was successfully fought with a glass half full approach. Today's pessimistic CISOs have yet to confirm the findings. This week's episode is hosted by me, David Spark (@dspark), producer of CISO Series and founder of Spark Media Solutions and Mike Johnson. Our guest is George Finney (@wellawaresecure), CISO, Southern Methodist University and author of "Well Aware: The Nine Cybersecurity Habits to Protect Your Future". Thanks to our sponsor, Netskope. The Netskope security cloud provides unrivaled visibility and real-time data and threat protection when accessing cloud services, websites, and private apps from anywhere, on any device. Only Netskope understands the cloud and takes a data-centric approach that empowers security teams with the right balance of protection and speed they need to secure their digital transformation journey. On this week's episode Vendors have questions our CISOs have answers Neil Saltman of Anomali runs a CISO meetup group and he asks, "A common topic is CISOs going back to platform vendors versus best of breed because they are overwhelmed. When do you buy best of breed vs. just add it to the stack from Microsoft or other large vendors… When I worked at Bromium I had a CISO tell me 'I'll buy your product when Microsoft buys you.'" Mike Johnson leans more to best-of-breed or in some cases build it yourself. Can Mike sympathize with these other CISOs and what would his situation have to be to make a platform play? What I learned from a CISO One of the main tenets of George's new book, "Well Aware: The Nine Cybersecurity Habits to Protect Your Future" is that optimists outperform pessimists in productivity, wealth, and longevity. The "Department of No" cybersecurity people are just hurting themselves. You argue that the more positive attitude can be garnered by learning from people who have successfully protected their communities. What are examples of watching another's success, and what can you learn? What's Worse?! Both are going to cause problems. It's tough to say which one's worse. It's time for "Ask a CISO" We've got a request for career advice, from an anonymous listener. We'll call him Steve. Steve has been with his company 14 years and they were recently acquired and the new company was calling the shots. After the acquisition, the CISO and Steve were working on bringing the merged companies up to compliance standards and dealing with audits: SOC 2, Sarbanes-Oxley, PCI, etc. CISO was planning on leaving the company in 2021 and grooming Steve to replace him. Then COVID hit and the company gave the CISO a beautiful severance package leaving Steve with all the CISO's responsibilities, but not the title change or salary. Steve asked the CIO about plans to replace the CISO and the CIO said Steve could apply once the position was announced. That was 5 months ago. Steve likes his job and the people he's working with but he's frustrated with no clear vision of future plans. We offer up some advice for Steve. What's the best way to handle this Can we opt-in to cybersecurity awareness? At one of our live shows I asked the audience, "Who has gone through security awareness training?" Every hand went up with a loud audible groan. Most of us would like to opt-out of this mandated training. What if our coworkers could be enticed to opt-in? It's the end of cybersecurity awareness month. What have you done or seen others do that's actually worked? And now the far trickier question, what has worked over a long time?

All links and images for this episode can be found on CISO Series (https://cisoseries.com/can-a-robot-be-concerned-about-your-privacy/) I want AI to be efficient, but I also want my space. This week's episode is hosted by me, David Spark (@dspark), producer of CISO Series and founder of Spark Media Solutions and Mike Johnson. Our sponsored guest is Rebecca Weekly (@rebeccalipon), senior director of hyperscale strategy and execution, senior principal engineer, Intel. Thanks to this week's podcast sponsor, Intel. Intel's new suite of security features in the upcoming Xeon Scalable platform improves data confidentiality and integrity in a world that increasingly relies on it. Features like Intel SGX further enable confidential computing scenarios — crucial for organizations in regulated industries to meet growing security requirements and protect sensitive data. On this week's episode Why is everybody talking about this now "The lack of women in cybersecurity leaves the online world at greater risk," stated Naomi Schalit of The Conversation. Mollie Chard of Capgemini shared the article that generated a lot of conversation. Naomi hit many issues we've discussed before like diversity offers different viewpoints, which is critical for building a cybersecurity program. I would like to focus on the dynamic of the security team. I've been in testosterone-fueled environments and things change dramatically when just one woman enters the room. And it changes even more when there are more women. What is that dynamic, why is it valuable, and what's the danger of the all-male environment? Well that didn't work out the way we expected At the end of every show I ask our guests, "Are you hiring?" And prior to COVID, almost everyone said desperately, "YES, we're hiring." That has changed dramatically for the worse since COVID started. Emma Brighton has a story on InfoSecurity Magazine about the real shortage that's happening. Problems she points to are the need to secure more communications channels, security people being offloaded to do IT support, and the competition for skilled talent. What is COVID doing to our security environment and our staff? What's Worse?! Everyone in the loop or out of the loop? Please, Enough. No, More. Today's topic is security on the chipset. We have never talked about this on the show, but now we've got someone from Intel and it seemed appropriate now would be the time to do just that. What have we heard enough about chip-level security, and what would we like to hear a lot more? Are we having communication issues Will the fight to maintain privacy always be in conflict? The people who collect data always want more information so they can get greater insights. Outside of regulations, they have no incentive to maintain privacy. As we're collecting more and more information automatically and artificial intelligence systems are making decisions for us, can AI systems be made privacy aware while still being effective at gaining insights? What would that even look like?

All links and images for this episode can be found on CISO Series (https://cisoseries.com/bonus-episode:-innovators-spotlight/) What makes a security solution innovative? Where do you think security desperately needs innovation? And what do you look for in a security vendor's presentation? On this very special bonus episode of CISO/Security Vendor Relationship Podcast, I invite two special guests, David Tyburski, CISO, Wynn Resorts and Matt Crouse (@mattcrouse), CISO, Taco Bell to answer that very question AND determine if any of the three competing security vendors during the Evanta 2020 Global CISO Virtual Executive Summit were in fact innovative. Our three competitors (and also sponsors) were: John Worrall (@jworrall), CEO, ZeroNorth Nick Halsey (@nickhalsey), CEO, Okera Demetrios Lazarikos, CEO and co-founder, Blue Lava Thanks to these sponsors and Evanta for their support on this episode.

All links and images for this episode can be found on CISO Series (https://cisoseries.com/a-phish-so-insidious-you-cant-help-but-be-jealous/) Wait, that's a phish even I'd fall for. This episode is hosted by me, David Spark (@dspark), producer of CISO Series and founder of Spark Media Solutions and Mike Johnson. Our guest this week is Matt Crouse, CISO, Taco Bell. Huge thanks to our sponsor, CloudKnox. CloudKnox Security is the market leader within Gartner's newly defined Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) segment. CloudKnox transforms how organizations implement the principle of least privilege in the cloud and empowers security teams to proactively address accidental and malicious credential misuse by continuously detecting and mitigating insider risks. On this week's episode Here's some surprising research Here's a depressing statistic. Ninety four percent of security and business leaders say they've suffered "one or more business-impacting cyberattacks in the last year — that is, an attack resulting in a loss of customer, employee, or other confidential data; interruption of day-to-day operations; ransomware payout; financial loss or theft; and/or theft of intellectual property." This according to a Forrester Consulting study sponsored by Tenable. Do we accept the sobering fact that a business-impacting cyberattack is an annual inevitability? And if so, what percentage of a CISO's job is putting systems in place to minimize damage, and what are ways you do that? If you're not paranoid yet here's your chance Get ready for a really nasty phishing attack. Craig Hays, bug bounty hunter particularly interested in phishing, tells a story of a wormable phish that after taking over one user's email account began to reply to legitimate email threads from that account. The phisher would actually read the thread and create a relevant response, but with a phishing link which would then compromise another user's email account in the same way. And the phisher would repeat the process from yet another account, causing this wormable phish to spread not just through the initially targeted company, but through their partners, suppliers, and their partners and suppliers. At the time Craig's company didn't have multi-factor authentication (MFA) implemented to which Craig realizes that would stop such an attack. Yet, in the end he was very impressed with this type of attack because it has so many indicators of legitimacy. Have we experienced a similar attack and/or do we have a "favorite" phishing attack in terms of its effectiveness? What's Worse?! Audit season is about to begin. What would you advise? On the Cybersecurity subreddit, GenoSecurity asks, "What types of projects would look good on a resume since I have no work experience. I am also open to projects that might not look as good but are good for beginners since I'm currently working on my Net+ cert." Close your eyes and visualize the perfect engagement Last Friday we had an online after party using a new tool called Toucan which simulates a real party in a virtual setting. We've also used a platform called Icebreaker that allows for one-on-one random meetups. And last week I participated in a table top cyberthreat exercise with Bruce Potter of Expel and Shmoocon that ran like a Dungeons and Dragons role playing game. All were fun and had their value. Since the launch of the pandemic, how have we been able to socialize and stay connected in fun and unique ways?

All links and images for this episode can be found on CISO Series (https://cisoseries.com/whether-its-vulnerabilities-or-children-we-like-to-pick-favorites/) While you do have to claim all of your vulnerabilities and your children, you don't have to like all of them. This episode is hosted by me, David Spark (@dspark), producer of CISO Series and founder of Spark Media Solutions and Mike Johnson. Our sponsored guest this week is Ben Sapiro, global CISO, Great-West LifeCo. HUGE thanks to our sponsor, Kenna Security. With Kenna Security, companies efficiently manage the right level of risk for their business. Our Modern Vulnerability Management model eliminates the friction between Security and IT teams about what to patch, providing clear prioritization based on real-time threat intelligence and guidance applied to each customer's unique environment across infrastructure, applications and IoT. On this week's episode Why is everybody talking about this now Do you have a clear overall picture of how you're protecting your environment? The Cyber Defense Matrix, an open source tool created by Sounil Yu, a former guest, offers a simple five-by-five grid with the x-axis being the five operational functions of the NIST Cybersecurity Framework and the Y-axis are the five asset classes cyber professionals are trying to secure (devices, applications, networks, data, users). The idea is you are supposed to fill in all 25 squares as best as possible to see where you might have gaps in your security program. Ross Young, CISO, Caterpillar Financial Services Corporation, and a recent guest on this show, has adapted the matrix, by changing the Y-axis to four risks of phishing, ransomware, web app attacks, third party risks. So what's a better way of building out at your security program: by the assets that you're trying to protect or the risks that you're facing? What are the pros and cons of each method? Can you change Mike's mind On a previous show Mike said he is NOT a fan of security through obscurity. Utku Sen of HackerOne argues that security through obscurity is underrated. His argument was that adding "obscurity" is often costless and it adds another layer in your defense in depth program. It is far from bulletproof, but obscurity reduces the likelihood which lowers your overall risk. Examples he included were obfuscating your code in your program, and/or using random variables in the code. Can we change Mike's mind? Is there a level of security through obscurity he has deployed and/or would consider? What's Worse?! What's better? Good and bad data or no data? Please, enough! No, more. Today's topic is vulnerability management, or specifically, vulnerability remediation. What have you heard enough of on vulnerability management, and what would you like to hear a lot more? Question for the board What misconceptions does the board have of the role of the CISO? On LinkedIn, Amar Singh of Cyber Management Alliance Limited, listed off what the CISO is and, isn't, and what inappropriate demands are made on them. He said the CISO is -NOT a super-being or a magician -NOT there to fix IT blunders -NOT the only guardian of the realm -Unable to STOP all cyber-attacks. -NOT a scapegoat/sacrificial lamb -NOT accountable but responsible We often get the sense that CISOs do play these roles as they come in and out. What can be done to temper these beliefs? "

All links and images for this episode can be found on CISO Series (https://cisoseries.com/i-want-to-but-i-just-cant-trust-your-single-pane-of-glass/) I've already got a view into my company's security. It's going to take a lot to get me to to dump it for your solution. This episode is hosted by me, David Spark (@dspark), producer of CISO Series and founder of Spark Media Solutions and Mike Johnson. Our guest this week is Joshua Scott (@joshuascott94), former CISO, Realtor.com. HUGE thanks to our sponsor, Kenna Security. With Kenna Security, companies efficiently manage the right level of risk for their business. Our Modern Vulnerability Management model eliminates the friction between Security and IT teams about what to patch, providing clear prioritization based on real-time threat intelligence and guidance applied to each customer's unique environment across infrastructure, applications and IoT. On this week's episode First 90 days of a CISO How do you define the likelihood of impact? Yaron Levi, CISO, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Kansas City, shared an article by Brian Spanswick of Splunk who discussed this process of building out a company's security program, and that mission should be "mitigate the likelihood and potential business impact of a breach while supporting an organization's strategic goals and business objectives." Our guest was Realtor.com's first CISO. He built their cybersecurity program from scratch. We talked about how he reduced impact while staying keen to the organization's objectives. How do you go about discovering new security solutions In the last three years, where have our guests successfully innovated in cybersecurity? Why did they do it? And where do they think they need the next innovation? What's Worse?! How much battle damage do you want your CISO to have? Can you change Mike's mind Mike inspired me to ask this question on Twitter, "What would a single pane of glass need to have for you to dump your current pane of glass?" This was has major argument that each single pane of glass requires him to dump his current one. The question is what type of mountain does a security vendor need to climb for him to unload his current view of his security program. What Is It and Why Do I Care? Today's topic is threat detection and I'm a little loose on this as I got slight variations on threat detection from insider threats, to SIEM, to just threat detection. I'm lumping them all into the umbrella of threat detection, but it'll be obvious which is which. Vendors send various pitches explaining their category and also explaining what differentiates them. Mike and our guest will determine which is the best and from that and I will announce the winners, but only the winners.

All links and images for this episode can be found on CISO Series (https://cisoseries.com/security-is-suffering-from-devops-fomo/) Darn it. DevOps is having this awesome successful party and we want in! We've tried inserting ourselves in the middle (DevSecOps) and we launched a pre-party (shift left), but they still don't like us. This episode is hosted by me, David Spark (@dspark), producer of CISO Series and founder of Spark Media Solutions and Mike Johnson. Our sponsored guest this week is Dayo Adetoye (@dayoadetoye), senior manager - security architecture and engineering, Mimecast. Thanks to our sponsor, Capsule8. Capsule8 is defining modern enterprise protection by providing detection and response for Linux infrastructure in any environment. Capsule8 provides host-based detection and investigatory data for incident response with on-going support. Unlike anyone else, Capsule8 mitigates the financial, scalability and reliability limitations of protecting your Linux infrastructure. On this week's episode Are we making the situation better or worse? What makes a successful phish? On Sophos' blog Paul Ducklin writes about their most successful phishing emails. Ducklin noted that most of the successful phishes dealt with mundane and undramatic issues that still had a sense of importance. Looking at these examples they do seem to follow a similar pattern of something looking official that is being requested from the company and could you click here to check it out. Is that the majority of what you're testing? If so, what exactly is the value in conducting phishing tests on employees? Can the testing have a negative effect in security or even morale? There's got to be a better way to handle this What is the right approach to threat modeling? In a blog post, Chris Romeo of Security Journey opines that formal training or tools won't work. Security needs to ask questions of developers about features and then show them how a threat evolves, thus allowing them to ultimately do it themselves. Adam Shostack of Shostack and Associates advocates for formal training. He says Romeo's informal approach to threat modeling sounds attractive, but doesn't work because you're trying to scale threat modeling across developers and if you tell one developer the information it's going to be passed down like a game of telephone where each successive person tells a distorted version of what the last person said. So what's the right approach to building threat models across a DevOps environment? What's Worse?! What's the worst place to find your company assets? Close your eyes and visualize the perfect engagement Shifting Left. DevSecOps, These are the mechanisms that have been used to infuse security into the DevOps supply chain. While noble, both concepts break the philosophy and structure of DevOps which is based on automation, speed, and delivery. But, DevOps is also about delivering quality. So rather than inserting themselves, how does security participate in a way that DevOps already loves? If you haven't made this mistake, you're not in security On AskNetSec on reddit, Triffid-oil asked, "What was something that you spent effort learning and later realized that it was never going to be useful?" And let me add to that, it's something either someone told you or you believed for some reason it was critical for your cybersecurity education and you later realized it wasn't valuable at all.

All links and images for this episode can be found on CISO Series (https://cisoseries.com/enjoying-my-blissful-ignorance-of-cyber-vulnerabilities/) What keeps me up at night? Nothing! That's because I hold onto cybersecurity myths because it makes me believe I don't have a security problem. This episode is hosted by me, David Spark (@dspark), producer of CISO Series and founder of Spark Media Solutions and Mike Johnson. Our guest this week is Dustin Wilcox, CISO, Anthem. Thanks to our sponsor, Capsule8 Capsule8 is defining modern enterprise protection by providing detection and response for Linux infrastructure in any environment. Capsule8 provides host-based detection and investigatory data for incident response with on-going support. Unlike anyone else, Capsule8 mitigates the financial, scalability and reliability limitations of protecting your Linux infrastructure. On this week's episode Why is everybody talking about this now Kris Rides of Tiro Security asks, "When writing a job description in cybersecurity, what's your process?" What in the job description is most important that you want potential candidates to know? And do you have any universal requirements of all candidates? Is this a cyber security disinformation campaign? Stuart Mitchell of Stott and May posted an article from FoxNews on cybersecurity myths, such as I don't have anything worth protecting, I will know when something bad happens. From this list, or possibly another myth, which one do you think is the most damaging? What's Worse?! Public or government interference? There's got to be a better way to handle this Why are InfoSec professionals still struggling to secure their cloud environments? According to a study by Dimension Research, sponsored by Tripwire, 76 percent admit to having trouble. And only 21 percent they're assessing their overall cloud security posture in real time or near real time. What are the quarter of security professionals doing who are not struggling with securing the cloud? Close your eyes and visualize the perfect engagement Do we need more cybersecurity professionals, or do we just need our general workforce to be more cybersecurity minded? Phil Venables, Board Director - Goldman Sachs Bank, makes a good argument for the latter. Mike has mentioned that when he can make cybersecurity personal, like offering employees a password manager, they start to see the value. Assuming making security personal is the best tactic, what is the ripple effect of that? How do they approach security at your business and how do the efforts of the security team change?

All links and images for this episode can be found on CISO Series (https://cisoseries.com/tell-me-were-secure-so-i-can-go-back-to-ignoring-security/) I don't know anything about our state of security. I don't want to know either. But I do want to know you know about security and there's nothing I have to worry about. You can do that, right? This episode is hosted by me, David Spark (@dspark), producer of CISO Series and founder of Spark Media Solutions and Mike Johnson. Our guest this week is Dan Walsh, CISO, Rally Health. Thanks to our sponsor, Capsule8. Capsule8 is defining modern enterprise protection by providing detection and response for Linux infrastructure in any environment. Capsule8 provides host-based detection and investigatory data for incident response with on-going support. Unlike anyone else, Capsule8 mitigates the financial, scalability and reliability limitations of protecting your Linux infrastructure. On this week's episode Why is everybody talking about this now How do you respond to "Are we secure?" It's a loaded question that we've addressed previously. Daniel Hooper, CISO, Varo Money brought up this topic again that caused a flurry of discussion on LinkedIn. In the past Mike has mentioned that he talks about the state of his security program and where it's heading. The core of this question is anxiety about something a non-security person doesn't understand. How does a security leader break down this question into small parts, and what question should a CEO be asking if not "Are we secure?" There's got to be a better way to handle this The engineering team at Rally Health is around 800 and our guest Dan has a security team of 30+ of which only 5 of them are application security people. Those five are definitely going to need some help if they're going to have an impact on how secure the applications are. I ask Dan Walsh what he's doing with the engineers that's turning them into application security force multipliers. What's Worse?! How damaging is a bad reputation? What do you think of this vendor marketing tactic? CISOs have ways to retalilate against aggressive sales tactics. George Finney, CISO at Southern Methodist University told a story on LinkedIn about an unsolicited sales invite that was sent to 65 people at his school. He blocked the email. He asked the community if that was too harsh. Similarly Steve Zalewski, deputy CISO of Levi's said if he sees aggressive tactics by a company, the security team has the ability to block the whole domain from their servers. Are these tactics too harsh? Have Mike and our guest taken similar tactics, and/or is there something else they do in response to extremely aggressive sales tactics? If you haven't made this mistake, you're not in security How prepared do you need to handle your next cyber job? A question was asked on reddit from someone who wasn't sure they should take a job because they didn't have all the skills to do the job. Most people just said, "Do it." How would Mike and our guest answer this question as an employee and a manager. What level of unpreparedness for a job is acceptable and possibly even exciting? Could too much result in imposter syndrome?

All links and images for this episode can be found on CISO Series (https://cisoseries.com/request-a-demo-of-our-inability-to-post-a-demo/) It's really easy to include "Request a Demo" button on our site. But potential buyers would actually like to just watch a demo on our site. Should we actually expend just a little more effort to record a demo and upload it to our site? This episode is hosted by me, David Spark (@dspark), producer of CISO Series and founder of Spark Media Solutions and Mike Johnson. Our guest this week is Ross Young, CISO, Caterpillar Financial Services Corporation. Thanks to our sponsor, Kenna Security. With Kenna Security, companies efficiently manage the right level of risk for their business. Our Modern Vulnerability Management model eliminates the friction between Security and IT teams about what to patch, providing clear prioritization based on real-time threat intelligence and guidance applied to each customer's unique environment across infrastructure, applications and IoT. On this week's episode Why is everybody talking about this now? Our guest posted about the 10+ daily product pitches he receives and he suggested that vendors place a product demo on their site. It just so happens, I also posted about this on LinkedIn. I am astonished that not every vendor spends their first marketing dollars on creating a product demo and posting that video. If a security practitioner is interested in a company, how do they begin their research? What do they look for? Do they watch product demo videos? Do they click the "request a demo" button? First 90 Days of a CISO Our guest shared a study from PWC that points out what management thinks are the most important roles for a CISO. Eighty four percent considered the ability to educate and collaborate across the business was critical making it the top most skill they look for in a CISO. At the same time, it appears investing in a talent management program for leadership was the least important with only 22 percent responding. What I read from this is management wants you to lead, and get the whole company on board, but do it alone. Plus, they expect you to be a perfect cybersecurity leader out of the box. Is that feasible? Is this why we're having so much burnout of CISOs? It's not just the pressure of protecting, but taking on all leadership responsibilities with no ongoing support? What's Worse?! How are you advertising for new hires? There's got to be a better way to handle this Turns out half of employees are cutting corners on security when working from home. This includes using home computers for corporate work, emailing sensitive documents from personal accounts. It's not malicious, but the distractions of work from home life and demands to deliver quickly are forcing employees to take the less secure route. Also, being away from the watchful IT and security gives them the breathing room to be less careful. Tip of the hat to Gina Yacone of Agio for posting this article from ZDnet about Tessian's work from home study. How can security leaders stay in contact with employees so they don't stray? How CISOs are digesting the latest security news What makes a security podcast valuable? What elements does a cybersecurity podcast need to have for you to say to yourself, "I'm glad I spent the time listening to that"?

All links and images for this episode can be found on CISO Series (https://cisoseries.com/the-do-what-we-tell-you-technique-isnt-working/) We've yelled, we've screamed, we've complained, and we've whined. Those darn users simply don't do what they tell them to do. I guess we're going to have to give empathy a try. This episode is hosted by me, David Spark (@dspark), producer of CISO Series and founder of Spark Media Solutions and Mike Johnson. Our guest this week is Michelle Valdez (@scauzim), CISO, OneMain Financial. Thanks to this week's podcast sponsor, PlexTrac. PlexTrac is a revolutionary, yet simple, cybersecurity platform that centralizes all security assessments, penetration test reports, audit findings, and vulnerabilities into a single location. PlexTrac vastly improves the risk management lifecycle, allowing security professionals to generate better reports faster, aggregate and visualize important analytics, and collaborate on remediation in real-time. On this week's episode Why is everybody talking about this now Why hasn't COVID spurned more disaster recovery and business continuity planning roles? This is what Stuart Mitchell, a recruiter at Stott and May, noticed. Obviously, he's not getting that much demand. The community says it's assumed already into many roles. I have to think BCP and DR are everyone's responsibility. If that's the case, has BCP and DR planning increased during this time? Why or why not? How to become CISO Are two CISOs better than one? Our guest mentioned that her company has split the CISO role. One, the head of tech, reports to the CTO and the other, our guest's role, CISO and head of cyber risk reports to the chief risk officer. How exactly does this work? And what does our guest believe are the pros and cons of splitting the CISO role this way? What's Worse?! This time, no matter what the answer, everyone's going to get in trouble. And now for a little security philosophy Chad Loder, Habitu8, said, "Us InfoSec experts spend too much time asking 'How do we get users to care more about security?' and not enough time asking 'How do we get security to care more about users?'" So I asked my host and guest that question, and more importantly, how has that learning about users improved their security team and overall security? First 90 days of a CISO William Birchett, CIO of Required Team Gear, asked, "When you start, how much do you know of what security posture you've inherited?" We've talked about this before, but I want you to answer in reflection. What were the biggest surprises (positive or negative) between what you knew starting out and what you discovered after 90 days on the job?

All links and images for this episode can be found on CISO Series (https://cisoseries.com/set-it-forget-it-reset-it-repeat/) As long as you reset it and repeat, everything in cybersecurity is "set it and forget it". This episode is hosted by me, David Spark (@dspark), producer of CISO Series and founder of Spark Media Solutions and Mike Johnson. Our guest this week is Brett Conlon (@DecideSecurity), CISO, Edelman Financial Engines. Check out Tricia Howard's dramatic readings of cold emails. Our Keyavi breaks new ground by making data itself intelligent and self-aware, so that it stays under its owner's control and protects itself immediately, no matter where it is or who is attempting access. Keyavi is led by a team of renowned data security, encryption, and cyber forensics experts. See for yourself at keyavidata.com. On this week's episode Why is everybody talking about this now On LinkedIn and on Twitter, I asked "Is there anything in cybersecurity that's 'set it and forget it'?" There were plenty of funny answers like "Passwords" and the "Off" switch. But there were some interesting answers like whitelists from Brian Haugli of Sidechannel security and ethics from Stephen Gill of Russel Holdings. So many treat security as "set it and forget it" but we know that's a path to insecurity. Regardless, is there ANYTHING in security we can set and forget? Question for the board Our guest claims he's got an awesome board. I don't think we've ever heard that on our show. In most cases there's either fear of the board or the CISO doesn't even get direct conversation with the board. I asked our guest what is it about his board that's so awesome and what tips could he give to CISOs to move their board into that territory? What's Worse?! Who is going to handle physical assets the worst? If you haven't made this mistake, you're not in security Alexander Rabke, Splunk, asked, "How should sales people handle situations when, in fact, you are a security company with a security vulnerability (he also talked about a product not working) - what do you tell customers. How do you like to see this handled by the vendor?" I know a first response is to be honest, but they want to hold onto your business. What's a way salespeople could go about doing that? What do you think of this pitch? We're not talking vendor pitches in this segment. We're talking candidate pitches. Gary Hayslip, CISO, Softbank Investment Advisers and former guest on this show has an article on Peerlyst, a platform which is unfortunately going away, about finding your first job in security. Hayslip's first tip asks, "What information do you have?" Researching yourself is good advice, but I want to extend that to a question that I think puts you ahead of the pack and ask, "What's your unfair advantage?" It's a question that I heard investor Chris Sacca ask startups and I think it can also apply to individuals applying for jobs. Agree? If so, what are some good unfair advantages from candidates that have put them over the top?

All links and images for this episode can be found on CISO Series (https://cisoseries.com/i-need-resources-to-free-up-my-resources) Automation sounds wonderful and I'd love to have some free time, but geez, who do I need to hire to make that happen? This episode is hosted by me, David Spark (@dspark), producer of CISO Series and founder of Spark Media Solutions and Mike Johnson. Our sponsored guest this week is Aaron Ansari (@theanswar), VP, Cloud One, Trend Micro. Thanks to this week's podcast sponsor Trend Micro. Trend Micro Incorporated, a global leader in cybersecurity solutions, helps to make the world safe for exchanging digital information. Our innovative solutions for consumers, businesses, and governments provide layered security for data centers, cloud environments, networks, and endpoints. For more information, visit www.trendmicro.com. On this week's episode There's got to be a better way to handle this How well has the cybersecurity automation gambit played itself out? Last year, Ericka Chickowski wrote a piece on Dark Reading about the cybersecurity automation paradox. She said that "security teams find that a lack of automation expertise keeps them from getting the most out of cybersecurity automation." According to a Ponemon study, that accounts for 56% of organizations. That's the number one obstacle. It's more than legacy IT challenges, lack of budget, and interoperability issues. 40% of respondents say they'll need to hire more people to support security automation. Everyone speaks of wanting automation, but is it more of an aspiration and a marketing pitch? Has it specifically alleviated any pain over the past year. And if so, what? What annoys a CISO? For my co-host MIke Johnson, the annoyance is the "single panes of glass" that so many security vendors offer. Our guest, Aaron Ansari is ready to challenge Mike on his grand distaste for "the single pane of glass" as the window to your security status/infrastructure/whatever you like it to be. "What's Worse?!" What's worse, failure but honesty, or success and deception? Please, Enough. No, More. Topic is "cloud configuration." What have we heard enough about with cloud configuration, and what would we like to hear a lot more? Ummm. Maybe you shouldn't have done that We're talking about vendor lock-in. It makes recurring sales for vendors super easy. But it makes exit strategies very difficult. On Quora, the question was asked, "How do huge companies like Netflix avoid vendor lock-in with a cloud computing provider?" So I ask the question to both of you, what safeguards can you setup to prevent vendor lock-in or at least make an exit from a cloud provider as painless as possible? Creative Commons photo attribution to Alden Jewell (CC BY 2.0)

All links and images for this episode can be found on CISO Series (https://cisoseries.com/were-not-fooled-by-your-diversity-theater/) We're casting for our diversity theater program on the latest episode of CISO/Security Vendor Relationship Podcast. This episode is hosted by me, David Spark (@dspark), producer of CISO Series and founder of Spark Media Solutions and Mike Johnson. Our guest this week is Matt Conner, CISO, National Geospatial Intelligence Agency. Thanks to this week's podcast sponsor, PlexTrac PlexTrac is a revolutionary, yet simple, cybersecurity platform that centralizes all security assessments, penetration test reports, audit findings, and vulnerabilities into a single location. PlexTrac vastly improves the risk management lifecycle, allowing security professionals to generate better reports faster, aggregate and visualize important analytics, and collaborate on remediation in real-time. How CISOs are digesting the latest security news If you thought tech firms were abysmal with diversity hiring, it appears venture capital firms are even worse. In a Washington Post article by Nitasha Tiku, just 1 percent of VC dollars went to black start-up founders in 2018, and that same year and percentage reflects the number of black decision-makers at VC firms as well. With the scrutiny turned up, small minority-focused funds have spurned, and there has been some cosmetic title inflation of minority employees at VC firms, but black tech entrepreneurs are brushing it off as diversity theater. What opportunities and money are VC firms leaving on the table by not taking diversity seriously? What should VC firms do to prove that their efforts are not diversity theater? We don't have much time. What's your decision? Interesting question on reddit by throwawaycostam who asks, "How do you create easy to memorize, yet relatively strong passwords?" A password manager is first and foremost recommended, but there are cases where you do have to remember a few passwords, like the one to get into your password manager and desktop screen lock. If you have to memorize five really good complex passwords, what technique do you recommend to create those passwords? What's Worse?! Is clueless better than not being engaged? It's time for "Ask a CISO" On a previous episode, CISO, Dennis Leber, now with University of Tennessee Health Science Center, but previously with a state government agency said there's no perfect pitch a vendor could make to him that would facilitate a sale. Heck, he couldn't even write the perfect pitch to himself that would work. We know the government is a different beast when it comes to procurement. What are the stumbling blocks vendors need to concern themselves when pitching a government agency? We've got listeners and they've got questions Jesse Rosenbaum of Varonis brought a job posting to my attention that showed requests for extremely specific experiences with different applications. Jesse asks, does the listing the name of products or protocols you're using expose the company to additional security risks? Isn't this the reason so many customers of security vendors are not willing to give testimonials? But if they're putting these products and protocols in job descriptions, isn't this the same darn thing?

All links and images for this episode can be found on CISO Series (https://cisoseries.com/how-to-tell-if-your-ciso-sucks-at-their-job/) If your CISO wants to be a 'visionary' but they can't seem to pull off basic security functions, they probably suck at their job. This episode is hosted by me, David Spark (@dspark), producer of CISO Series and founder of Spark Media Solutions and Mike Johnson. Our guest this week is Lee Parrish (@leeparrish), CISO, Hertz. Thanks to this week's podcast sponsor, Keyavi Data. Our Keyavi breaks new ground by making data itself intelligent and self-aware, so that it stays under its owner's control and protects itself immediately, no matter where it is or who is attempting access. Keyavi is led by a team of renowned data security, encryption, and cyber forensics experts. See for yourself at keyavidata.com. On this week's episode Is this the best use of our Money On CSO Online, Terena Bell has a piece on how to cut your budget without hurting security. The suggestions are well known: Identify overlaps in technology, renogiate contracts, and use tech to lower the need for manhours. Her last tip was a warning about layoffs. Are you always looking to reduce costs or is it something you do when it's mandated? And how are you supported by the business if and when you proactively reduce costs? Or does that not ever happen because the demand is ever growing. Is this where I should put my marketing dollars? I'm not sure, but it's possible that our guest is our first CISO that has an MBA. In his role as CISO he's mentioned he uses common marketing techniques to advance your organization's cybersecurity program. He said, "Security is just an inside sales job and that marketing creates the demand that sales fulfills." Lee tells us about what he learned in his MBA training that was so critical for your growth as a CISO. What's Worse?! We have a split decision on third party risk management. How a security vendor helped me this week We haven't done this segment in a long time and we got a request from a listener to bring it back. So I ask Mike and our guest, recently, how has a security vendor helped you. And were any of those security vendors who helped not customers? We've got listeners and they've got questions A listener, who wishes to remain anonymous asks this question: "How do you convince a CISO to focus on the basics?" The listener goes on and says, "I'm not a CISO but have seen and talked to many that want to be seen as 'visionaries' so they focus on 'new hotness' things like 'zero trust' instead of the basics things that are missing like patching, asset management, etc." The listener understand this, and he's obviously talking about his own CISO, hence the anonymity, but how do you approach your CISO and get him or her to balance their own time with basics or as Yaron Levi, CISO of Blue Cross Blue Shield of Kansas City says, "fundamentals" while also having a forward looking vision of security?

All links and images for this episode can be found on CISO Series (https://cisoseries.com/how-will-the-candidate-respond-to-whats-worse/) A potential candidate's response to a "What's Worse?!" question will show how they can handle risk decisions. This episode is hosted by me, David Spark (@dspark), producer of CISO Series and founder of Spark Media Solutions and Mike Johnson. Our sponsored guest this week is Elliot Lewis (@elliotdlewis), CEO, Keyavi Data. Thanks to this week's podcast sponsor, Keyavi Data (formerly Encryptics) Now you can share data without ever losing control of it. Our advanced architecture makes data self-protecting, intelligent and self-aware – wherever it goes, no matter who has it. Our .SAFE patented multi-key technology enables data to evaluate its own safety conditions, including geo-sensing, recipient authentication, and policy changes from its owner. Contact Keyavi Data today and see for yourself. On this week's episode Why is everybody talking about this now If we could change one thing about the cybersecurity industry, what would it be? Rilhouse on reddit brought this post by Naomi Buckwalter of Energage to my attention. What you can change are processes and behavior currently in the industry. Is this the best solution? Both Mike and Elliot hire cybersecurity talent. Here's a question from bubblehack3r on reddit who asked during our AMA. "What are your different methods and tools you use to verify and test the professionally of a new hire in the cyber security domain?" "What's Worse?!" The shortest ever "What's Worse?!" question. Please, Enough. No, More. Encryption. We've had it around for decades, but people and companies still don't use it. What have you heard enough about regarding encryption and what would you like to hear a lot more? It's time for "Ask a CISO" What have Mike and Elliot learned from a product deployment that they didn't realize until after they deployed it.

All links and images for this episode can be found on CISO Series (https://cisoseries.com/i-love-cold-calls-said-the-ciso-on-opposite-day/) While CISOs are not excited to receive your unexpected phone call, they are excited to listen to this week's episode of CISO/Security Vendor Relationship Podcast. This episode is hosted by me, David Spark (@dspark), producer of CISO Series and founder of Spark Media Solutions and Mike Johnson. Our guest this week is Helen Patton, CISO, The Ohio State University. GitGuardian empowers organizations to secure their secrets - such as API keys and other credentials - from being exposed in compromised places or leaked publicly. GitGuardian offers a threat intelligence solution focused on detecting secrets leaked on public GitHub and an automated secrets detection solution which tightly integrates with your DevOps pipeline. On this week's episode Why is everybody talking about this now Are we making ourselves safer by calling end users "dumb"? On LinkedIn, Shaun Marion, CISO, Republic Services called out those security professionals who chose to put down the end user. As a result, security professionals in aggregate are getting a bad wrap. What do you do to change this long held belief of security professionals as putting down the end user? Rich Mason of Critical Infrastructure said, "offer something beyond training to mitigate the damage potential of that click. You can bash those who don't heed your advice on running with scissors or you can design better processes and safer scissors." How do you go about building systems and behavior of the security team with the end user in mind? Are we having communication issues? There is ENDLESS debate on cold calling. I know most CISOs despise it, but as evidenced by Ross Gustavson of Reciprocity, he met 120% of his sales quota solely on cold calling. He posted all his stats so you simply can't argue with that success rate. And Jay Jensen of Sales Evolution said the conversation of cold calling should be about how to do it effectively, and not whether it should be eradicated. And Allan Alford said he wants the conversation to be about partnering with sales staff. What is the communication you're open to having with a security vendor to which you don't currently have a relationship? What's Worse?! Those miserable team building exercises. Is there a worse way to do them? If you haven't made this mistake, you're not in security Eli Migdal of Boardish ran a poll on LinkedIn asking how many cyber professionals suffer from impostor syndrome. Sixty two percent believed most did, and Allan Alford, who admitted having it himself, said he was on a call with 25 other security professionals and all of them admitted to suffering at one time from impostor syndrome. Why does this come about and is it healthy or detrimental? RESOURCE: Do You Suffer From Impostor Syndrome? You Are Not Alone Is this where I should put my marketing dollars? On LinkedIn, I published an article entitled, "Formula for Creating a Successful Security Podcast." In it I just talked about my experience publishing successful and not successful shows. I'm a proponent of security vendors using their marketing dollars to produce podcasts because it's a means to create a one-to-many and many-to-many relationship with the audience. Focusing on other security and technology podcasts, what makes us excited to listen to a show and actually engage with the show or other listeners. And have we for any reason stopped listening to a show and why? NOTE: CISO Series and its parent company Spark Media Solutions is now offering consulting and production services for others, including vendors, who want to launch and maintain their own successful podcast. Please contact me, David Spark, for more information.

All links and images for this episode can be found on CISO Series (https://cisoseries.com/nytimes-critic-called-our-security-theater-unconvincing/) We tried to pull off the Hamilton of security theater and we fell short. This episode is hosted by me, David Spark (@dspark), producer of CISO Series and founder of Spark Media Solutions and Mike Johnson. Our guest this week is Shawn Bowen (@smbowen), CISO, Restaurant Brands International which handles restaurants such as Burger King, Popeye's, Tim Hortons, and Louisiana Kitchen. Thanks to this week's podcast sponsor GitGuardian. GitGuardian empowers organizations to secure their secrets - such as API keys and other credentials - from being exposed in compromised places or leaked publicly. GitGuardian offers a threat intelligence solution focused on detecting secrets leaked on public GitHub and an automated secrets detection solution which tightly integrates with your DevOps pipeline. On this week's episode How CISOs are digesting the latest security news We recorded this episode on June 24th, just a five days after Trump's first rally in Oklahoma where purportedly TikTok fans en masse were able to register for Trump's rally and fool his entire staff into believing that 1 million people had registered and were planning to attend his rally. In the end, the arena was less than half full. We are all well aware that some cyber protests can cause serious damage, but does this one? Is this the kind of peaceful cyber protests that we should encourage or not encourage? Dan Lohrmann at Security Mentor posted this discussion and said no matter what political affiliation you're on this is a call for more cybersecurity because this will happen again. But is this the fault of Trump's cyber team or his social media team for not keeping an eye on TikTok? Why is everybody talking about this now? On AskNetSec on reddit, NoInterestingGuy, a college student starting his first internship at a security firm, posted he likes to participate in "extracurricular activities". He then asked, "If I were to get caught with a crime related to cyber security, would that impact my chances significantly of getting hired in the future for a security company?" The community almost resoundingly said, "Stop," but has Mike and our guest ever hired someone with a cybercrime past or caught an employee engaging in cybercrime? How did they handled it. Is there an "it depends" meter? We all do stupid stuff in college. What's Worse?! Is the unknowing always the worst? It's security awareness training time On CSO Online, J.M. Porup wrote a piece about five examples of security theater and how to spot them. Security theater refers to the practice having a show of implementing security where its effectiveness is in question. Some examples are purposefully complex passwords, checkbox compliance, and bad security awareness training. How do we spot security theater? Is there any value to security theater? What's the antidote? If it's in place, how do we eradicate it? What Is It and Why Do I Care? We played this game before and like the "What's Worse?!" game, the title pretty much explains it. I have three pitches from three different vendors who are all in the same category, Security Awareness Training. I have asked the reps to first, in 25 words or less, just explain their category. That's the "What Is It?" and then for the "Why Do I Care?" I asked them to explain what differentiates their product or makes them unique also in 25 words or less. It is up to Mike and Shawn pick their favorite of each and explain why. I only reveal the winning contestants and their companies.

All links and images for this episode can be found on CISO Series (https://cisoseries.com/why-am-i-working-harder-during-this-pandemic/) Is it the increased work or the pandemic itself that's causing us all to work more than we've ever worked before? This episode is hosted by me, David Spark (@dspark), producer of CISO Series and founder of Spark Media Solutions and Mike Johnson. Our guest this week is Christopher Zell, vp, head of information security, The Wendy's Company. Thanks to this week's podcast sponsor GitGuardian. GitGuardian empowers organizations to secure their secrets - such as API keys and other credentials - from being exposed in compromised places or leaked publicly. GitGuardian offers a threat intelligence solution focused on detecting secrets leaked on public GitHub and an automated secrets detection solution which tightly integrates with your DevOps pipeline. On this week's episode Why is everybody talking about this now? On TechRepublic, Scott Matteson wrote an article about cybersecurity pros working harder than ever during the pandemic. Stuart Mitchell of Stott and May posted the article to LinkedIn and asked if anyone has taken a day off since COVID-19 started, and the general consensus is no. I see a multitude of factors affecting this: increased surface area to protect, compliance is more difficult, I also have to deal with my family, and where the heck is anyone going to go for vacation? I guess I'll just work. Close your eyes and visualize the perfect engagement On LinkedIn, our guest Chris Zell asked others to be more welcoming when you see someone post "aspiring cybersecurity professional." We discussed the approach and what the community could teach us. What's Worse?! Three options of how to talk to the board. There's got to be a better way to handle this On CSO Online, Mary Pratt has a guide for CISOs on securely laying people off. What are critical technical considerations during layoff time, and as a manager how do you manage security for those people who are still there. Have either of you made a massive security mistake during a layoff that was a great learning experience for you? What Is It and Why Do I Care? We played this game before and like the "What's Worse?!" game, the title pretty much explains it. I have three pitches from three different vendors who are all in the same category of governance, risk and compliance or GRC. I have asked the reps to first, in 25 words or less, just explain their category. That's the "What Is It?" and then for the "Why Do I Care?" I asked them to explain what differentiates their product or makes them unique also in 25 words or less. It is up to Mike and Chris to pick their favorite of each and explain why. I only reveal the winning contestants and their companies. Ready to play?

All links and images for this episode can be found on CISO Series (https://cisoseries.com/i-have-the-perfect-job-for-you-but-probably-not/) You put those qualifications on your resume, and I queried. So don't blame me for getting your hopes up. This episode is hosted by me, David Spark (@dspark), producer of CISO Series and founder of Spark Media Solutions and Mike Johnson. Our guest this week Brandon Greenwood, vp, security, Overstock.com. Thanks to this week's podcast sponsor Trend Micro. Trend Micro Incorporated, a global leader in cybersecurity solutions, helps to make the world safe for exchanging digital information. Our innovative solutions for consumers, businesses, and governments provide layered security for data centers, cloud environments, networks, and endpoints. For more information, visit www.trendmicro.com. On this week's episode How CISOs are digesting the latest security news Paul Martini of iboss asks, "What network weaknesses has the current pandemic revealed?" Close your eyes and visualize the perfect engagement As evidenced by a previous episode, security recruiters have a hard time getting some respect. Let's discuss this issue from the viewpoint of the candidate. On Peerlyst, David Froud of Concept Security felt that the recruiter approach of saying I have a perfect job for you was misguided. Mike and our guest talk about their early security careers and how welcome they were to approaches from security recruiters. What's Worse?! Crappy tools or crappy team? What's worse? I tell ya, CISOs get no respect On CSO Online, Neal Weinberg has a story about hard truths security professionals have to deal with. One item was the outright lack of respect, being misunderstood and underappreciated, from the board and your coworkers. I know the generic response is communications and listen, but I want to know what are ways to command leadership so those do pay attention to you and you do get that respect. We discuss specific turning points in security leadership careers that allowed Mike and our guest to do this. Vendors have questions. Our CISOs have answers Dennis Underwood of Cyber Crucible asks if you can you be a threat hunter if you have to sign NDAs. Are NDAs the cover up so companies don't have to reveal information about their failed defenses? And are NDAs a common occurrence in bug bounties?

All links and images for this episode can be found on CISO Series (https://cisoseries.com/we-compensate-our-low-paying-ciso-jobs-with-high-stress/) On this week's episode we're seeking candidates for unrealistically low-paying CISO positions. This episode is hosted by me, David Spark (@dspark), producer of CISO Series and founder of Spark Media Solutions and Mike Johnson. Our guest this week is Nir Rothenberg, CISO, Rapyd. Thanks to this week's podcast sponsor Trend Micro. Trend Micro Incorporated, a global leader in cybersecurity solutions, helps to make the world safe for exchanging digital information. Our innovative solutions for consumers, businesses, and governments provide layered security for data centers, cloud environments, networks, and endpoints. For more information, visit www.trendmicro.com. On this week's episode Why is everyone talking about this now? On LinkedIn, Farhan Khan, a recruiter at CyberApt Recruitment, told a tale of getting a call asking if he could help his company recruit a seasoned CISO for their 300+ person company. He was excited until he found out the salary they were offering the CISO was in the range of $90-$105K. We've talked before about unrealistic CISO salaries before, but this is actually below the rate of entry level cyber positions in the Bay Area. How do CISOs or heck any cybersecurity professional handle someone's unrealistic expectations? Do you say something or just say, "No thank you"? Also, Davi Ottenheimer of Inrupt, brought this story to my attention and argued that high CISO salaries are just attracting fraudsters. Does our panel agree, and if so, what would a company have to be wary of? Mike's Confused. Let's help him out On previous shows Mike has admitted he would not want to (not confused although that may be part of it) run the IT department. Nir mentioned that he feels that getting out of one's comfort zone is critical, no matter what department you're in. What are the pros and cons of other departments not just being security aware, but taking on cybersecurity responsibilities? And vice versa, cybersecurity taking on other department responsibilities? How far can/should it go? What's Worse?! Too much flexibility or too many restrictions? We've got listeners and they've got questions Anya Shpilman of Swiss Gulf Partners sent recorded this question: "I'm a recruiter and I specialize in cybersecurity recruitment. At the end of the show everyone says they're hiring. But I have a hard time getting traction from CISOs. So what would you like to see/hear in those initial emails or LinkedIn messages." Go here to record a question to be played on one of our shows. Umm, Is this good idea? I recently published an article on CISO Series entitled "25 API Security Tips You're Probably Not Considering". The very first tip, from Gary Hayslip, CISO, Softbank Investment Advisers, is K.I.S.S. or Keep It Simple Stupid. I then went on to provide 24 more tips from experts which if you were to deploy them all would in no way be simple. KISS sounds great in theory, but how the heck do you pull it off in practice. Can you point to an example of how you took something that was complicated and simplified it?

All links and images for this episode can be found on CISO Series (https://cisoseries.com/keep-pouring-ill-tell-you-when-ive-had-enough-security/) When do we hit the diminishing returns of too much cybersecurity? How will we know? Will a bell go off? Will our cup runneth over? This week's episode is hosted by me, David Spark (@dspark), producer of CISO Series and founder of Spark Media Solutions and Mike Johnson. Our guest is Tony Sager, svp, chief evangelist, Center for Internet Security. Thanks to this week's podcast sponsor, AppOmni. AppOmni is the leading provider of SaaS security and management platform for the enterprise. AppOmni provides unprecedented data access visibility, management and security of SaaS, enabling organizations to secure mission-critical and sensitive data. With AppOmni, organizations can automatically and continuously enforce rules for data access, data sharing and third-party applications. On this week's episode Looking down the security roadmap Dean Webb of ForeScout asked this great question on Peerlyst. "What are the things that are the hardest to fix that leave organizations the most vulnerable?" These are not the quick security fixes or low hanging fruit, but rather the big projects that nobody wants that often never get finished. What are they and is there any way to make them not so painful? It's time for "Ask a CISO" sitdownson on reddit's AskNetSec asked, "How and when did you decide to specialize?" Sultan_of_Ping answered, "For most people it's not a decision, the specialization comes to them." Do you get a taste of everything and then determine which one you're passionate about? Do you read market demands (e.g. cloud security) and go in that route? What have you seen your colleagues do? What's Worse?! A "What's Worse?!" first - FOUR scenarios. Which one is worst? Here's some surprising research We're revisiting the Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report. Tony's organization, Center for Internet Security had a hand in the report and specifically at the end where you map the CIS top 20 to the breach findings. In particular, the report notes that there are 171 safeguards that are grouped based on the resources and risks the organizations are facing. Has anything shifted significantly in this most recent report? What's the return on investment? Tip of the hat to Norman Hunt, Deputy CISO, GEICO, who sent this article from HelpNet Security about a study on CEOs and CISOs approaches to "When is security enough security?" There seems to be a disparity with CEOs being more confident with the security that CISOs. I have to assume that mature understanding of risk is the biggest contributor, and the nature of the job of a CISO who sees more threats than the CEO, but only in a cyber context. A CEO sees all the other risks. What causes such swings in opinions?

All links and images for this episode can be found on CISO Series (https://cisoseries.com/facebook-personality-quiz-asks-whats-your-favorite-password/) What's your favorite combination of letters, numbers, and symbols you like to use to log onto your favorite app or financial institution? Let us know and we'll see if it matches any of your friends! This week's episode is hosted by me, David Spark (@dspark), producer of CISO Series and founder of Spark Media Solutions and Mike Johnson. Our guest this week is Lakshmi Hanspal (@lakshmihanspal), CISO, Box. Thanks to this week's podcast sponsor, CyberArk. At CyberArk, we believe that sharing insights and guidance across the CISO community will help strengthen security strategies and lead to better-protected organizations. CyberArk is committed to the continued exploration of topics that matter most to CISOs related to improving and integrating privileged access controls. On this week's episode Why is everybody talking about this now? On AskNetSec on reddit, user u/L7nx asks, "How do you handle alert fatigue?" Many vendors out there listening want to scream, "We've got a single pane of glass solution!" On reddit, Kamwind commented that it's not so much managing the output, but rather the input and false positives. "What are you doing to tune those rules and IOCs (indicators of compromise) to reflect your network vs accepting them from whatever vendor you're getting them from." Is alert fatigue a real thing and what can be done to manage input and output? It's security awareness training time There's a meme resurfacing that pokes fun at Facebook personality quizzes that ask seemingly innocuous questions such as "What's Your Favorite Band?" and "What's Your Favorite Teacher's Name?" In the meme, the answers to each question are just one word of the sentence, "Stop giving people your personal info to guess your passwords and security questions." We've talked about training programs that rely on fear. Humor seems rather effective here, but heck, I don't know. Does humor in security training work? Does fear? What tone have you seen actually foster behavioral change? What's Worse?! Do you likeable or useful vendors? Sometimes they're not both. Here's some surprising research The Verizon DBIR is out. Mike's favorite. There's a ton to unpack as there always is, but for this segment I just want to visit one item in this report and that's configuration errors. From a quote by Larry Dignan on ZDNet: "Errors definitely win the award for best supporting action this year. They are now equally as common as social breaches and more common than malware... hacking remains higher, and that is due to credential theft and use." I get the sense that second to black hat hackers, we're our own worst enemy. One argument for the increase in cloud breaches is because security researchers and others are discovering exposed storage in the cloud. Could it be just poor training of cloud security? Or poorly maintained cloud providers? Vendors have questions. Our CISOs have answers Landon Winkelvoss of Nisos asks, "What do your good vendors do on an ongoing basis (quarterly, monthly, weekly, etc) that make renewals easier around budget season? How often should they do it? What metrics and impacts to the business should they document and present that make this relatable to people outside of security such as the CFO?"