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Cloud Security Podcast by Google

Cloud Security Podcast by Google

283 episodes — Page 3 of 6

S1 Ep 181EP181 Detection Engineering Deep Dive: From Career Paths to Scaling SOC Teams

Guest: Zack Allen, Senior Director of Detection & Research @ Datadog, creator of Detection Engineering Weekly Topics: What are the biggest challenges facing detection engineers today? What do you tell people who want to consume detections and not engineer them? What advice would you give to someone who is interested in becoming a detection engineer at her organization? So, what IS a detection engineer? Do you need software skills to be one? How much breadth and depth do you need? What should a SOC leader whose team totally lacks such skills do? You created Detection Engineering Weekly. What motivated you to start this publication, and what are your goals for it? What are the learnings so far? You work for a vendor, so how should customers think of vendor-made vs customer-made detections and their balance? What goes into a backlog for detections and how do you inform it? Resources: Video (LinkedIn, YouTube) Zacks's newsletter: https://detectionengineering.net EP75 How We Scale Detection and Response at Google: Automation, Metrics, Toil EP117 Can a Small Team Adopt an Engineering-Centric Approach to Cybersecurity? The SRE book "Detection Spectrum" blog "Delivering Security at Scale: From Artisanal to Industrial" blog (and this too) "Detection Engineering is Painful — and It Shouldn't Be (Part 1)" blog series "Detection as Code? No, Detection as COOKING!" blog "Practical Threat Detection Engineering: A hands-on guide to planning, developing, and validating detection capabilities" book SpecterOps blog

Jul 15, 202430 min

S1 Ep 180EP180 SOC Crossroads: Optimization vs Transformation - Two Paths for Security Operations Center

Guests: Mitchell Rudoll, Specialist Master, Deloitte Alex Glowacki, Senior Consultant, Deloitte Topics: The paper outlines two paths for SOCs: optimization or transformation. Can you elaborate on the key differences between these two approaches and the factors that should influence an organization's decision on which path to pursue? The paper also mentions that alert overload is still a major challenge for SOCs. What are some of the practices that work in 2024 for reducing alert fatigue and improving the signal-to-noise ratio in security signals? You also discuss the importance of automation for SOCs. What are some of the key areas where automation can be most beneficial, and what are some of the challenges of implementing automation in SOCs? Automation is often easier said than done… What specific skills and knowledge will be most important for SOC analysts in the future that people didn't think of 5-10 years ago? Looking ahead, what are your predictions for the future of SOCs? What emerging technologies do you see having the biggest impact on how SOCs operate? Resources: "Future of the SOC: Evolution or Optimization —Choose Your Path" paper and highlights blog "Meet the Ghost of SecOps Future" video based on the paper EP58 SOC is Not Dead: How to Grow and Develop Your SOC for Cloud and Beyond The original Autonomic Security Operations (ASO) paper (2021) "New Paper: "Future of the SOC: Forces shaping modern security operations" (Paper 1 of 4)" "New Paper: "Future of the SOC: SOC People — Skills, Not Tiers" (Paper 2 of 4)" "New Paper: "Future Of The SOC: Process Consistency and Creativity: a Delicate Balance" (Paper 3 of 4)"

Jul 8, 202428 min

S1 Ep 179EP179 Teamwork Under Stress: Expedition Behavior in Cybersecurity Incident Response

Guests: Robin Shostack, Security Program Manager, Google Jibran Ilyas, Managing Director Incident Response, Mandiant, Google Cloud Topics: You talk about "teamwork under adverse conditions" to describe expedition behavior (EB). Could you tell us what it means? You have been involved in response to many high profile incidents, one of the ones we can talk about publicly is one of the biggest healthcare breaches at this time. Could you share how Expedition Behavior played a role in our response? Apart from during incident response which is almost definitionally an adverse condition, how else can security teams apply this knowledge? If teams are going to embrace an expeditionary behavior mindset, how do they learn it? It's probably not feasible to ship every SOC team member off to the Okavango Delta for a NOLS course. Short of that, how do we foster EB in a new team? How do we create it in an existing team or an under-performing team? Resources: EP174 How to Measure and Improve Your Cloud Incident Response Readiness: A New Framework EP103 Security Incident Response and Public Cloud - Exploring with Mandiant EP98 How to Cloud IR or Why Attackers Become Cloud Native Faster? "Take a few of these: Cybersecurity lessons for 21st century healthcare professionals" blog Getting More by Stuart Diamond book Who Moved My Cheese by Spencer Johnson book

Jul 1, 202423 min

S1 Ep 1EP178 Meet Brandon Wood: The Human Side of Threat Intelligence: From Bad IP to Trafficking Busts

Guest: Brandon Wood, Product Manager for Google Threat Intelligence Topics: Threat intelligence is one of those terms that means different things to everyone–can you tell us what this term has meant in the different contexts of your career? What do you tell people who assume that "TI = lists of bad IPs"? We heard while prepping for this show that you were involved in breaking up a human trafficking ring: tell us about that! In Anton's experience, a lot of cyber TI is stuck in "1. Get more TI 2. ??? 3. Profit!" How do you move past that? One aspect of threat intelligence that's always struck me as goofy is the idea that we can "monitor the dark web" and provide something useful. Can you change my mind on this one? You told us your story of getting into sales, you recently did a successful rotation into the role of Product Manager,, can you tell us about what motivated you to do this and what the experience was like? Are there other parts of your background that inform the work you're doing and how you see yourself at Google? How does that impact our go to market for threat intelligence, and what're we up to when it comes to keeping the Internet and broader world safe? Resources: Video EP175 Meet Crystal Lister: From Public Sector to Google Cloud Security and Threat Horizons EP128 Building Enterprise Threat Intelligence: The Who, What, Where, and Why EP112 Threat Horizons - How Google Does Threat Intelligence Introducing Google Threat Intelligence: Actionable threat intelligence at Google scale A Requirements-Driven Approach to Cyber Threat Intelligence

Jun 24, 202432 min

S1 Ep 177EP177 Cloud Incident Confessions: Top 5 Mistakes Leading to Breaches from Mandiant

Guests: Omar ElAhdan, Principal Consultant, Mandiant, Google Cloud Will Silverstone, Senior Consultant, Mandiant, Google Cloud Topics: Most organizations you see use both cloud and on-premise environments. What are the most common challenges organizations face in securing their hybrid cloud environments? You do IR so in your experience, what are top 5 mistakes organizations make that lead to cloud incidents? How and why do organizations get the attack surface wrong? Are there pillars of attack surface? We talk a lot about how IAM matters in the cloud. Is that true that AD is what gets you in many cases even for other clouds? What is your best cloud incident preparedness advice for organizations that are new to cloud and still use on-prem as well? Resources: Next 2024 LIVE Video of this episode / LinkedIn version (sorry for the audio quality!) "Lessons Learned from Cloud Compromise" podcast at The Defender's Advantage "Cloud compromises: Lessons learned from Mandiant investigations" in 2023 from Next 2024 EP174 How to Measure and Improve Your Cloud Incident Response Readiness: A New Framework EP103 Security Incident Response and Public Cloud - Exploring with Mandiant EP162 IAM in the Cloud: What it Means to Do It 'Right' with Kat Traxler

Jun 17, 202430 min

S1 Ep 176EP176 Google on Google Cloud: How Google Secures Its Own Cloud Use

Guest: Seth Vargo, Principal Software Engineer responsible for Google's use of the public cloud, Google Topics: Google uses the public cloud, no way, right? Which one? Oh, yeah, I guess this is obvious: GCP, right? Where are we like other clients of GCP? Where are we not like other cloud users? Do we have any unique cloud security technology that we use that others may benefit from? How does our cloud usage inform our cloud security products? So is our cloud use profile similar to cloud natives or traditional companies? What are some of the most interesting cloud security practices and controls that we use that are usable by others? How do we make them work at scale? Resources: EP12 Threat Models and Cloud Security (previous episode with Seth) EP66 Is This Binary Legit? How Google Uses Binary Authorization and Code Provenance EP75 How We Scale Detection and Response at Google: Automation, Metrics, Toil EP158 Ghostbusters for the Cloud: Who You Gonna Call for Cloud Forensics IAM Deny Seth Vargo blog "Attention Is All You Need" paper (yes, that one)

Jun 10, 202427 min

S1 Ep 175EP175 Meet Crystal Lister: From Public Sector to Google Cloud Security and Threat Horizons

Guest: Crystal Lister, Technical Program Manager, Google Cloud Security Topics: Your background can be sheepishly called "public sector", what's your experience been transitioning from public to private? How did you end up here doing what you are doing? We imagine you learned a lot from what you just described – how's that impacted your work at Google? How have you seen risk management practices and outcomes differ? You now lead Google Threat Horizons reports, do you have a vision for this? How does your past work inform it? Given the prevalence of ransomware attacks, many organizations are focused on external threats. In your experience, does the risk of insider threats still hold significant weight? What type of company needs a dedicated and separate insider threat program? Resources: Video on YouTube Google Cybersecurity Action Team Threat Horizons Report #9 Is Out! Google Cybersecurity Action Team site for previous Threat Horizons Reports EP112 Threat Horizons - How Google Does Threat Intelligence Psychology of Intelligence Analysis by Richards J. Heuer The Coming Wave by Mustafa Suleyman Visualizing Google Cloud: 101 Illustrated References for Cloud Engineers and Architects

Jun 3, 202426 min

S1 Ep 174EP174 How to Measure and Improve Your Cloud Incident Response Readiness: A New Framework

Guest: Angelika Rohrer, Sr. Technical Program Manager , Cyber Security Response at Alphabet Topics: Incident response (IR) is by definition "reactive", but ultimately incident prep determines your IR success. What are the broad areas where one needs to prepare? You have created a new framework for measuring how ready you are for an incident, what is the approach you took to create it? Can you elaborate on the core principles behind the Continuous Improvement (CI) Framework for incident response? Why is continuous improvement crucial for effective incident response, especially in cloud environments? Can't you just make a playbook and use it? How to overcome the desire to focus on the easy metrics and go to more valuable ones? What do you think Google does best in this area? Can you share examples of how the CI Framework could have helped prevent or mitigate a real-world cloud security incident? How can other organizations practically implement the CI Framework to enhance their incident response capabilities after they read the paper? Resources: "How do you know you are "Ready to Respond"? paper EP75 How We Scale Detection and Response at Google: Automation, Metrics, Toil EP103 Security Incident Response and Public Cloud - Exploring with Mandiant EP158 Ghostbusters for the Cloud: Who You Gonna Call for Cloud Forensics EP98 How to Cloud IR or Why Attackers Become Cloud Native Faster?

May 27, 202421 min

S1 Ep 173EP173 SAIF in Focus: 5 AI Security Risks and SAIF Mitigations

Guest: Shan Rao, Group Product Manager, Google Topics: What are the unique challenges when securing AI for cloud environments, compared to traditional IT systems? Your talk covers 5 risks, why did you pick these five? What are the five, and are these the worst? Some of the mitigation seems the same for all risks. What are the popular SAIF mitigations that cover more of the risks? Can we move quickly and securely with AI? How? What future trends and developments do you foresee in the field of securing AI for cloud environments, and how can organizations prepare for them? Do you think in 2-3 years AI security will be a separate domain or a part of … application security? Data security? Cloud security? Resource: Video (LinkedIn, YouTube) [live audio is not great in these] "A cybersecurity expert's guide to securing AI products with Google SAIF" presentation SAIF Site "To securely build AI on Google Cloud, follow these best practices" (paper) "Secure AI Framework (SAIF): A Conceptual Framework for Secure AI Systems" resources Corey Quinn on X (long story why this is here… listen to the episode)

May 20, 202433 min

S1 Ep 172EP172 RSA 2024: Separating AI Signal from Noise, SecOps Evolves, XDR Declines?

Guests: None Topics: What have we seen at RSA 2024? Which buzzwords are rising (AI! AI! AI!) and which ones are falling (hi XDR)? Is this really all about AI? Is this all marketing? Security platforms or focused tools, who is winning at RSA? Anything fun going on with SecOps? Is cloud security still largely about CSPM? Any interesting presentations spotted? Resources: EP171 GenAI in the Wrong Hands: Unmasking the Threat of Malicious AI and Defending Against the Dark Side (RSA 2024 episode 1 of 2) "From Assistant to Analyst: The Power of Gemini 1.5 Pro for Malware Analysis" blog "Decoupled SIEM: Brilliant or Stupid?" blog "Introducing Google Security Operations: Intel-driven, AI-powered SecOps" blog "Advancing the art of AI-driven security with Google Cloud" blog

May 13, 202427 min

S1 Ep 171EP171 GenAI in the Wrong Hands: Unmasking the Threat of Malicious AI and Defending Against the Dark Side

Guest: Elie Bursztein, Google DeepMind Cybersecurity Research Lead, Google Topics: Given your experience, how afraid or nervous are you about the use of GenAI by the criminals (PoisonGPT, WormGPT and such)? What can a top-tier state-sponsored threat actor do better with LLM? Are there "extra scary" examples, real or hypothetical? Do we really have to care about this "dangerous capabilities" stuff (CBRN)? Really really? Why do you think that AI favors the defenders? Is this a long term or a short term view? What about vulnerability discovery? Some people are freaking out that LLM will discover new zero days, is this a real risk? Resources: "How Large Language Models Are Reshaping the Cybersecurity Landscape" RSA 2024 presentation by Elie (May 6 at 9:40AM) "Lessons Learned from Developing Secure AI Workflows" RSA 2024 presentation by Elie (May 8, 2:25PM) EP50 The Epic Battle: Machine Learning vs Millions of Malicious Documents EP40 2021: Phishing is Solved? EP135 AI and Security: The Good, the Bad, and the Magical EP170 Redefining Security Operations: Practical Applications of GenAI in the SOC EP168 Beyond Regular LLMs: How SecLM Enhances Security and What Teams Can Do With It PyRIT LLM red-teaming tool Accelerating incident response using generative AI Threat Actors are Interested in Generative AI, but Use Remains Limited OpenAI's Approach to Frontier Risk

May 6, 202427 min

S1 Ep 170EP170 Redefining Security Operations: Practical Applications of GenAI in the SOC

Guest: Payal Chakravarty, Director of Product Management, Google SecOps, Google Cloud Topics: What are the different use cases for GenAI in security operations and how can organizations prioritize them for maximum impact to their organization? We've heard a lot of worries from people that GenAI will replace junior team members–how do you see GenAI enabling more people to be part of the security mission? What are the challenges and risks associated with using GenAI in security operations? We've been down the road of automation for SOCs before–UEBA and SOAR both claimed it–and AI looks a lot like those but with way more matrix math-what are we going to get right this time that we didn't quite live up to last time(s) around? Imagine a SOC or a D&R team of 2029. What AI-based magic is routine at this time? What new things are done by AI? What do humans do? Resources: Live video (LinkedIn, YouTube) [live audio is not great in these] Practical use cases for AI in security operations, Cloud Next 2024 session by Payal EP168 Beyond Regular LLMs: How SecLM Enhances Security and What Teams Can Do With It EP169 Google Cloud Next 2024 Recap: Is Cloud an Island, So Much AI, Bots in SecOps 15 must-attend security sessions at Next '24

Apr 29, 202427 min

S1 Ep 169EP169 Google Cloud Next 2024 Recap: Is Cloud an Island, So Much AI, Bots in SecOps

Guests: no guests (just us!) Topics: What are some of the fun security-related launches from Next 2024 (sorry for our brief "marketing hat" moment!)? Any fun security vendors we spotted "in the clouds"? OK, what are our favorite sessions? Our own, right? Anything else we had time to go to? What are the new security ideas inspired by the event (you really want to listen to this part! Because "freatures"...) Any tricky questions at the end? Resources: Live video (LinkedIn, YouTube) [live audio is not great in these] 15 must-attend security sessions at Next '24 Cloud CISO Perspectives: 20 major security announcements from Next '24 EP137 Next 2023 Special: Conference Recap - AI, Cloud, Security, Magical Hallway Conversations (last year!) EP136 Next 2023 Special: Building AI-powered Security Tools - How Do We Do It? EP90 Next Special - Google Cybersecurity Action Team: One Year Later! A cybersecurity expert's guide to securing AI products with Google SAIF Next 2024 session How AI can transform your approach to security Next 2024 session

Apr 22, 202427 min

S1 Ep 168EP168 Beyond Regular LLMs: How SecLM Enhances Security and What Teams Can Do With It

Guests: Umesh Shankar, Distinguished Engineer, Chief Technologist for Google Cloud Security Scott Coull, Head of Data Science Research, Google Cloud Security Topics: What does it mean to "teach AI security"? How did we make SecLM? And also: why did we make SecLM? What can "security trained LLM" do better vs regular LLM? Does making it better at security make it worse at other things that we care about? What can a security team do with it today? What are the "starter use cases" for SecLM? What has been the feedback so far in terms of impact - both from practitioners but also from team leaders? Are we seeing the limits of LLMs for our use cases? Is the "LLM is not magic" finally dawning? Resources: "How to tackle security tasks and workflows with generative AI" (Google Cloud Next 2024 session on SecLM) EP136 Next 2023 Special: Building AI-powered Security Tools - How Do We Do It? EP144 LLMs: A Double-Edged Sword for Cloud Security? Weighing the Benefits and Risks of Large Language Models Supercharging security with generative AI Secure, Empower, Advance: How AI Can Reverse the Defender's Dilemma? Considerations for Evaluating Large Language Models for Cybersecurity Tasks Introducing Google's Secure AI Framework Deep Learning Security and Privacy Workshop Security Architectures for Generative AI Systems ACM Workshop on Artificial Intelligence and Security Conference on Applied Machine Learning in Information Security

Apr 15, 202433 min

S1 Ep 167EP167 Stolen Cards and Fake Accounts: Defending Google Cloud Against Abuse

Speakers: Maria Riaz, Cloud Counter-Abuse, Engineering Lead, Google Cloud Topics: What is "counter abuse"? Is this the same as security? What does counter-abuse look like for GCP? What are the popular abuse types we face? Do people use stolen cards to get accounts to then violate the terms with? How do we deal with this, generally? Beyond core technical skills, what are some of the relevant competencies for working in this space that would appeal to a diverse set of audience? You have worked in academia and industry. What similarities or differences have you observed? Resources / reading: Video EP165 Your Cloud Is Not a Pet - Decoding 'Shifting Left' for Cloud Security P161 Cloud Compliance: A Lawyer - Turned Technologist! - Perspective on Navigating the Cloud "Art of War" by Sun Tzu "Dare to Lead" by Brene Brown "Multipliers" by Liz Wiseman

Apr 8, 202425 min

S1 Ep 166EP166 Workload Identity, Zero Trust and SPIFFE (Also Turtles!)

Guests: Evan Gilman, co-founder CEO of Spirl Eli Nesterov, co-founder CTO of Spril Topics: Today we have IAM, zero trust and security made easy. With that intro, could you give us the 30 second version of what a workload identity is and why people need them? What's so spiffy about SPIFFE anyway? What's different between this and micro segmentation of your network–why is one better or worse? You call your book "solving the bottom turtle" could you tell us what that means? What are the challenges you're seeing large organizations run into when adopting this approach at scale? Of all the things a CISO could prioritize, why should this one get added to the list? What makes this, which is so core to our internal security model–ripe for the outside world? How people do it now, what gets thrown away when you deploy SPIFFE? Are there alternative? SPIFFE is interesting, yet can a startup really "solve for the bottom turtle"? Resources: SPIFFE and Spirl "Solving the Bottom Turtle" book [PDF, free] "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" book [also, one of Anton's faves for years!] "Zero Trust Networks" book Workload Identity Federation in GCP

Apr 1, 202430 min

S1 Ep 165EP165 Your Cloud Is Not a Pet - Decoding 'Shifting Left' for Cloud Security

Guest: Ahmad Robinson, Cloud Security Architect, Google Cloud Topics: You've done a BlackHat webinar where you discuss a Pets vs Cattle mentality when it comes to cloud operations. Can you explain this mentality and how it applies to security? What in your past led you to these insights? Tell us more about your background and your journey to Google. How did that background contribute to your team? One term that often comes up on the show and with our customers is 'shifting left.' Could you explain what 'shifting left' means in the context of cloud security? What's hard about shift left, and where do orgs get stuck too far right? A lot of "cloud people" talk about IaC and PaC but the terms and the concepts are occasionally confusing to those new to cloud. Can you briefly explain Policy as Code and its security implications? Does PaC help or hurt security? Resources: "No Pets Allowed - Mastering The Basics Of Cloud Infrastructure" webinar EP33 Cloud Migrations: Security Perspectives from The Field EP126 What is Policy as Code and How Can It Help You Secure Your Cloud Environment? EP138 Terraform for Security Teams: How to Use IaC to Secure the Cloud

Mar 25, 202424 min

S1 Ep 164EP164 Quantum Computing: Understanding the (very serious) Threat and Post-Quantum Cryptography

Guest: Jennifer Fernick, Senor Staff Security Engineer and UTL, Google Topics: Since one of us (!) doesn't have a PhD in quantum mechanics, could you explain what a quantum computer is and how do we know they are on a credible path towards being real threats to cryptography? How soon do we need to worry about this one? We've heard that quantum computers are more of a threat to asymmetric/public key crypto than symmetric crypto. First off, why? And second, what does this difference mean for defenders? Why (how) are we sure this is coming? Are we mitigating a threat that is perennially 10 years ahead and then vanishes due to some other broad technology change? What is a post-quantum algorithm anyway? If we're baking new key exchange crypto into our systems, how confident are we that we are going to be resistant to both quantum and traditional cryptanalysis? Why does NIST think it's time to be doing the PQC thing now? Where is the rest of the industry on this evolution? How can a person tell the difference here between reality and snakeoil? I think Anton and I both responded to your initial email with a heavy dose of skepticism, and probably more skepticism than it deserved, so you get the rare on-air apology from both of us! Resources: Securing tomorrow today: Why Google now protects its internal communications from quantum threats How Google is preparing for a post-quantum world NIST PQC standards PQ Crypto conferences "Quantum Computation & Quantum Information" by Nielsen & Chuang book "Quantum Computing Since Democritus" by Scott Aaronson book EP154 Mike Schiffman: from Blueboxing to LLMs via Network Security at Google

Mar 18, 202431 min

S1 Ep 163EP163 Cloud Security Megatrends: Myths, Realities, Contentious Debates and Of Course AI

Guest: Phil Venables, Vice President, Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) @ Google Cloud Topics: You had this epic 8 megatrends idea in 2021, where are we now with them? We now have 9 of them, what made you add this particular one (AI)? A lot of CISOs fear runaway AI. Hence good governance is key! What is your secret of success for AI governance? What questions are CISOs asking you about AI? What questions about AI should they be asking that they are not asking? Which one of the megatrends is the most contentious based on your presenting them worldwide? Is cloud really making the world of IT simpler (megatrend #6)? Do most enterprise cloud users appreciate the software-defined nature of cloud (megatrend #5) or do they continue to fight it? Which megatrend is manifesting the most strongly in your experience? Resources: Megatrends drive cloud adoption—and improve security for all and infographic "Keynote | The Latest Cloud Security Megatrend: AI for Security" "Lessons from the future: Why shared fate shows us a better cloud roadmap" blog and shared fate page SAIF page "Spotlighting 'shadow AI': How to protect against risky AI practices" blog EP135 AI and Security: The Good, the Bad, and the Magical EP47 Megatrends, Macro-changes, Microservices, Oh My! Changes in 2022 and Beyond in Cloud Security Secure by Design by CISA

Mar 11, 202425 min

S1 Ep 162EP162 IAM in the Cloud: What it Means to Do It 'Right' with Kat Traxler

Guest: Kat Traxler, Security Researcher, TrustOnCloud Topics: What is your reaction to "in the cloud you are one IAM mistake away from a breach"? Do you like it or do you hate it? A lot of people say "in the cloud, you must do IAM 'right'". What do you think that means? What is the first or the main idea that comes to your mind when you hear it? How have you seen the CSPs take different approaches to IAM? What does it mean for the cloud users? Why do people still screw up IAM in the cloud so badly after years of trying? Deeper, why do people still screw up resource hierarchy and resource management? Are the identity sins of cloud IAM users truly the sins of the creators? How did the "big 3" get it wrong and how does that continue to manifest today? Your best cloud IAM advice is "assign roles at the lowest resource-level possible", please explain this one? Where is the magic? Resources: Video (Linkedin, YouTube) Kat blog "Diving Deeply into IAM Policy Evaluation" blog "Complexity: a Guided Tour" book EP141 Cloud Security Coast to Coast: From 2015 to 2023, What's Changed and What's the Same? EP129 How CISO Cloud Dreams and Realities Collide

Mar 4, 202428 min

S1 Ep 161EP161 Cloud Compliance: A Lawyer - Turned Technologist! - Perspective on Navigating the Cloud

Guest: Victoria Geronimo, Cloud Security Architect, Google Cloud Topics: You work with technical folks at the intersection of compliance, security, and cloud. So what do you do, and where do you find the biggest challenges in communicating across those boundaries? How does cloud make compliance easier? Does it ever make compliance harder? What is your best advice to organizations that approach cloud compliance as they did for the 1990s data centers and classic IT? What has been the most surprising compliance challenge you've helped teams debug in your time here? You also work on standards development –can you tell us about how you got into that and what's been surprising in that for you? We often say on this show that an organization's ability to threat model is only as good as their team's perspectives are diverse: how has your background shaped your work here? Resources: Video (YouTube) EP14 Making Compliance Cloud-native EP25 Beyond Compliance: Cloud Security in Europe Fordham University Law and Technology site IAPP site

Feb 26, 202427 min

S1 Ep 160EP160 Don't Cloud Your Judgement: Security and Cloud Migration, Again!

Guest: Merritt Baer, Field CTO, Lacework, ex-AWS, ex-USG Topics: How can organizations ensure that their security posture is maintained or improved during a cloud migration? Is cloud migration a risk reduction move? What are some of the common security challenges that organizations face during a cloud migration? Are there different gotchas between the three public clouds? What advice would you give to those security leaders who insist on lift/shift or on lift/shift first? How should security and compliance teams approach their engineering and DevOps colleagues to make sure things are starting on the right foot? In your view, what is the essence of a cloud-native approach to security? How can organizations ensure that their security posture scales as their cloud usage grows? Resources: Video (LinkedIn, YouTube) EP69 Cloud Threats and How to Observe Them EP138 Terraform for Security Teams: How to Use IaC to Secure the Cloud EP67 Cyber Defense Matrix and Does Cloud Security Have to DIE to Win? 9 Megatrends drive cloud adoption—and improve security for all Darknet Diaries podcast

Feb 19, 202427 min

S1 Ep 159EP159 Workspace Security: Built for the Modern Threat. But How?

Guests: Emre Kanlikilicer, Senior Engineering Manager @ Google Sophia Gu, Engineering Manager at Google Topics Workspace makes the claim that unlike other productivity suites available today, it's architectured for the modern threat landscape. That's a big claim! What gives Google the ability to make this claim? Workspace environments would have many different types of data, some very sensitive. What are some of the common challenges with controlling access to data and protecting data in hybrid work? What are some of the common mistakes you see customers making with Workspace security? What are some of the ways context aware access and DLP (now SDP) help with this? What are the cool future plans for DLP and CAA? Resources: Google Workspace blog & Workspace Update blog EP99 Google Workspace Security: from Threats to Zero Trust CISA Zero Trust Maturity Model 2.0

Feb 12, 202425 min

S1 Ep 158EP158 Ghostbusters for the Cloud: Who You Gonna Call for Cloud Forensics

Guest: Jason Solomon, Security Engineer, Google Topics: Could you share a bit about when you get pulled into incidents and what are your goals when you are? How does that change in the cloud? How do you establish a chain of custody and prove it for law enforcement, if needed? What tooling do you rely on for cloud forensics and is that tooling available to "normal people"? How do we at Google know when it's time to call for help, and how should our customers know that it's time? Can I quote Ray Parker Jr and ask, who you gonna call? What's your advice to a security leader on how to "prepare for the inevitable" in this context? Cloud forensics - is it easier or harder than the 1990s classic forensics? Resource: EP157 Decoding CDR & CIRA: What Happens When SecOps Meets Cloud EP98 How to Cloud IR or Why Attackers Become Cloud Native Faster? EP103 Security Incident Response and Public Cloud - Exploring with Mandiant Google SRE Workbook (Ch 9) GRR Cloud Logging LibCloudForensics, Turbinia, Timesketch tools

Feb 5, 202421 min

S1 Ep 157EP157 Decoding CDR & CIRA: What Happens When SecOps Meets Cloud

Guest: Arie Zilberstein, CEO and Co-Founder at Gem Security Topics: How does Cloud Detection and Response (CDR) differ from traditional, on-premises detection and response? What are the key challenges of cloud detection and response? Often we lift and shift our teams to Cloud, and not always for bad reasons, so what's your advice on how to teach the old dogs new tricks: "on-premise-trained" D&R teams and cloud D&R? What is this new CIRA thing that Gartner just cooked up? Should CIRA exist as a separate market or technology or is this just a slice of CDR or even SIEM perhaps? What do you tell people who say that "SIEM is their CDR"? What are the key roles and responsibilities of the CDR team? How is the cloud D&R process related to DevOps and cloud-style IT processes? Resources: Video version of this episode Cloud breaches databases EP98 How to Cloud IR or Why Attackers Become Cloud Native Faster? EP103 Security Incident Response and Public Cloud - Exploring with Mandiant EP76 Powering Secure SaaS … But Not with CASB? Cloud Detection and Response? 9 Megatrends drive cloud adoption—and improve security for all "Emerging Tech: Security — Cloud Investigation and Response Automation (CIRA) Offers Transformation Opportunities" (Gartner access required) "Does the World Need Cloud Detection and Response (CDR)?" blog

Jan 29, 202425 min

S1 Ep 156EP156 Living Off the Land and Attacking Critical Infrastructure: Mandiant Incident Deep Dive

Guest: Sandra Joyce, VP at Mandiant Intelligence Topics: Could you give us a brief overview of what this power disruption incident was about? This incident involved both Living Off the Land and attacks on operational technology (OT). Could you explain to our audience what these mean and what the attacker did here? We also saw a wiper used to hide forensics, is that common these days? Did the attacker risk tipping their hand about upcoming physical attacks? If we'd seen this intrusion earlier, might we have understood the attacker's next moves? How did your team establish robust attribution in this case, and how they do it in general? How sure are we, really? Could you share how this came about and maybe some of the highlights in our relationship helping defend that country? Resources: Sandworm Disrupts Power in Ukraine Using a Novel Attack Against Operational Technology | Mandiant Andy Greenberg's book Sandworm EP155 Cyber, Geopolitics, AI, Cloud - All in One Book?

Jan 22, 202425 min

S1 Ep 155EP155 Cyber, Geopolitics, AI, Cloud - All in One Book?

Guests: Derek Reveron, Professor and Chair of National Security at the US Naval War College John Savage, An Wang Professor Emeritus of Computer Science of Brown University Topics: You wrote a book on cyber and war, how did this come about and what did you most enjoy learning from the other during the writing process? Is generative AI going to be a game changer in international relations and war, or is it just another tool? You also touch briefly on lethal autonomous weapons systems and ethics–that feels like the genie is right in the very neck of the bottle right now, is it too late? Aside from this book, and the awesome course you offered at Brown that sparked Tim's interest in this field, how can we democratize this space better? How does the emergence and shift to Cloud impact security in the cyber age? What are your thoughts on the intersection of Cloud as a set of technologies and operating model and state security (like sovereignty)? Does Cloud make espionage harder or easier? Resources: "Security in the Cyber Age" book (and their other books') "Thinking, Fast and Slow" book "No Shortcuts: Why States Struggle to Develop a Military Cyber-Force" book "The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage, and Fear in the Cyber Age" book "Active Cyber Defense: Applying Air Defense to the Cyber Domain" EP141 Cloud Security Coast to Coast: From 2015 to 2023, What's Changed and What's the Same? EP145 Cloud Security: Shared Responsibility, Shared Fate, Shared Faith?

Jan 15, 202438 min

S1 Ep 154EP154 Mike Schiffman: from Blueboxing to LLMs via Network Security at Google

Guest: Mike Schiffman, Network Security "UTL" Topics: Given your impressive and interesting history, tell us a few things about yourself? What are the biggest challenges facing network security today based on your experience? You came to Google to work on Network Security challenges. What are some of the surprising ones you've uncovered here? What lessons from Google's approach to network security absolutely don't apply to others? Which ones perhaps do? If you have to explain the difference between network security in the cloud and on-premise, what comes to mind first? How do we balance better encryption with better network security monitoring and detection? Speaking of challenges in cryptography, we're all getting fired up about post-quantum and network security. Could you give us the maybe 5 minute teaser version of this because we have an upcoming episode dedicated to this? I hear you have some interesting insight on LLMs, something to do with blueboxing or something. What is that about? Resources: Video EP113 Love it or Hate it, Network Security is Coming to the Cloud EP122 Firewalls in the Cloud: How to Implement Trust Boundaries for Access Control "A History of Fake Things on the Internet" by WALTER J. SCHEIRER Why Google now protects its internal communications from quantum threats How Google is preparing for a post-quantum world NIST on PQC "Smashing The Stack For Fun And Profit" (yes, really)

Jan 8, 202435 min

S1 Ep 153EP153 Kevin Mandia on Cloud Breaches: New Threat Actors, Old Mistakes, and Lessons for All

Guest: Kevin Mandia, CEO at Mandiant, part of Google Cloud Topics: When you look back, what were the most surprising cloud breaches in 2023, and what can we learn from them? How were they different from the "old world" of on-prem breaches? For a long time it's felt like incident response has been an on-prem specialization, and that adversaries are primarily focused on compromising on-prem infrastructure. Who are we seeing go after cloud environments? The same threat actors or not? Could you share a bit about the mistakes and risks that you saw organizations make that made their cloud breaches possible or made them worse? Conversely, what ended up being helpful to organizations in limiting the blast radius or making response easier? Tim's mother worked in a network disaster recovery team for a long time–their motto was "preparing for the inevitable." What advice do you have for helping security teams and IT teams get ready for cloud breaches? Especially for recent cloud entrants? Anton tells his "2000 IDS story" (need to listen for details!) and asks: what approaches for detecting threats actually detects threats today? Resources: EP148 Decoding SaaS Security: Demystifying Breaches, Vulnerabilities, and Vendor Responsibilities "Microsoft lost its keys, and the government got hacked" news article SEC Charges SolarWinds and Chief Information Security Officer with Fraud, Internal Control Failures (must read by every CISO!)

Dec 18, 202328 min

S1 Ep 152EP152 Trust, Security and Google's Annual Transparency Report

Guest: Michee Smith, Director, Product Management for Global Affairs Works, Google Topics: What is Google Annual Transparency Report and how did we get started doing this? Surely the challenge of a transparency report is that there are things we can't be transparent about, how do we balance this? What are those? Is it a safe question? What Access Transparency Logs are and if they are connected to the report –other than in Tim's mind and your career? Beyond building the annual transparency report, you also work on our central risk data platform. Every business has a problem managing risk–what's special here? Do we have any Google magic here? Could you tell us about your path in Product Management here? You have been here eight years, and recently became Director. Do you have any advice for the ambitious Google PMs listening to the show? Resources: Google Annual Transparency report Access Transparency Logs "Digital Asset Valuation and Cyber Risk Measurement: Principles of Cybernomics" book Keyun Ruan "Trapped in a frame: Why leaders should avoid security framework traps" blog

Dec 11, 202326 min

S1 Ep 151EP151 Cyber Insurance in the Cloud Era: Balancing Protection, Data and Risks

Guest: Monica Shokrai, Head Of Business Risk and Insurance For Google Cloud Topics: Could you give us the 30 second run down of what cyber insurance is and isn't? Can you tie that to clouds? How does the cloud change it? Is it the case that now I don't need insurance for some of the "old school" cyber risks? What challenges are insurers facing with assessing cloud risks? On this show I struggle to find CISOs who "get" cloud, are there insurers and underwriters who get it? We recently heard about an insurer reducing coverage for incidents caused by old CVEs! What's your take on this? Effective incentive structure to push orgs towards patching operational excellence or someone finding yet another way not to pay out? Is insurance the magic tool for improving security? Doesn't cyber insurance have a difficult reputation with clients? "Will they even pay?" "Will it be enough?" "Is this a cyberwar exception?" type stuff? How do we balance our motives between selling more cloud and providing effective risk underwriting data to insurers? How soon do you think we will have actuarial data from many clients re: real risks in the cloud? What about the fact that risks change all the time unlike say many "non cyber" risks? Resources: Video (LinkedIn, YouTube) Google Cloud Risk Protection program "Cyber Insurance Policy" by Josephine Wolff InsureSec

Dec 4, 202326 min

S1 Ep 150EP150 Taming the AI Beast: Threat Modeling for Modern AI Systems with Gary McGraw

Guest: Dr Gary McGraw, founder of the Berryville Institute of Machine Learning Topics: Gary, you've been doing software security for many decades, so tell us: are we really behind on securing ML and AI systems? If not SBOM for data or "DBOM", then what? Can data supply chain tools or just better data governance practices help? How would you threat model a system with ML in it or a new ML system you are building? What are the key differences and similarities between securing AI and securing a traditional, complex enterprise system? What are the key differences between securing the AI you built and AI you buy or subscribe to? Which security tools and frameworks will solve all of these problems for us? Resources: EP135 AI and Security: The Good, the Bad, and the Magical Gary McGraw books "An Architectural Risk Analysis Of Machine Learning Systems: Toward More Secure Machine Learning" paper "What to think about when you're thinking about securing AI" Annotated ML Security bibliography Tay bot story (2016) "Can you melt eggs?" "Microsoft AI researchers accidentally leak 38TB of company data" "Random number generator attack" "Google's AI Red Team: the ethical hackers making AI safer" Introducing Google's Secure AI Framework

Nov 27, 202326 min

S1 Ep 149EP149 Canned Detections: From Educational Samples to Production-Ready Code

Guests: John Stoner, Principal Security Strategist, Google Cloud Security Dave Herrald, Head of Adopt Engineering, Google Cloud Security Topics: In your experience, past and present, what would make clients trust vendor detection content? Regarding "canned", default or "out-of-the-box" detections, how to make them more production quality and not merely educational samples to learn from? What is more important, seeing the detection or being able to change it, or both? If this is about seeing the detection code/content, what about ML and algorithms? What about the SOC analysts who don't read the code? What about "tuning" - is tuning detections a bad word now in 2023? Everybody is obsessed about "false positives," what about the false negatives? How are we supposed to eliminate them if we don't see detection logic? Resources: Video (Linkedin, YouTube) Github rules for Chronicle DetectionEngineering.net by Zack Allen "On Trust and Transparency in Detection" blog "Detection as Code? No, Detection as COOKING!" blog EP64 Security Operations Center: The People Side and How to Do it Right EP108 How to Hunt the Cloud: Lessons and Experiences from Years of Threat Hunting EP75 How We Scale Detection and Response at Google: Automation, Metrics, Toil Why is Threat Detection Hard? Detection Engineering is Painful — and It Shouldn't Be (Part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5)

Nov 20, 202328 min

S1 Ep 148EP148 Decoding SaaS Security: Demystifying Breaches, Vulnerabilities, and Vendor Responsibilities

Guest: Adrian Sanabria, Director of Valence Threat Labs at Valence Security, ex-analyst Topics: When people talk about "cloud security" they often forget SaaS, what should be the structured approach to using SaaS securely or securing SaaS? What are the incidents telling us about the realistic threats to SaaS tools? Is the Microsoft 365 breach a SaaS breach, a cloud breach or something else? Do we really need CVEs for SaaS vulnerabilities? What are the least understood aspects of securing SaaS? What do you tell the organizations who assume that "SaaS vendor takes care of all SaaS security"? Isn't CASB the answer to all SaaS security issues? We also have SSPM now too? Do we really need more tools? Resources: VIdeo (LinkedIn, YouTube) EP76 Powering Secure SaaS … But Not with CASB? Cloud Detection and Response? Valence 2023 State of SaaS Security report DHS Launches First-Ever Cyber Safety Review Board Enterprise Security Weekly podcast CloudVulnDb and another cloud vulnerability list Cyber Safety Review Board (CSRB) by CISA

Nov 12, 202329 min

S1 Ep 147EP147 Special: 2024 Google Cloud Security Forecast Report

Guest: Kelli Vanderlee, Senior Manager, Threat Analysis, Mandiant at Google Cloud Topics: Can you really forecast threats? Won't the threat actors ultimately do whatever they want? How can clients use the forecast? Or as Tim would say it, what gets better once you read it? What is the threat forecast for cloud environments? It says "Cyber attacks targeting hybrid and multi-cloud environments will mature and become more impactful" - what does it mean? Of course AI makes an appearance as well: "LLMs and other gen AI tools will likely be developed and offered as a service to assist attackers with target compromises." Do we really expect attacker-run LLM SaaS? What models will they use? Will it be good? There are a number of significant elections scheduled for 2024, are there implications for cloud security? Based on the threat information, tell me about something that is going well, what will get better in 2024? Resources: 2024 Google Cloud Security Forecast Report EP112 Threat Horizons - How Google Does Threat Intelligence EP135 AI and Security: The Good, the Bad, and the Magical How to Stop a Ransomware Attack Sophisticated StripedFly Spy Platform Masqueraded for Years as Crypto Miner

Nov 8, 202322 min

S1 Ep 146EP146 AI Security: Solving the Problems of the AI Era: A VC's Insights

Guest: Wei Lien Dang, GP at Unusual Ventures Topics: We have a view at Google that AI for security and security for AI are largely separable disciplines. Do you feel the same way? Is this distinction a useful one for you? What are some of the security problems you're hearing from AI companies that are worth solving? AI is obviously hot, and as always security is chasing the hotness. Where are we seeing the focus of market attention for AI security? Does this feel like an area that's going to have real full products or just a series of features developed by early stage companies that get acquired and rolled up into other orgs? What lessons can we draw on from previous platform shifts, e.g. cloud security, to inform how this market will evolve? Resources: "What to think about when you're thinking about securing AI" blog / paper EP135 AI and Security: The Good, the Bad, and the Magical EP136 Next 2023 Special: Building AI-powered Security Tools - How Do We Do It? EP144 LLMs: A Double-Edged Sword for Cloud Security? Weighing the Benefits and Risks of Large Language Models Introducing Google's Secure AI Framework OWASP Top 10 for Large Language Model Applications Unusual VC Startup Field Guide Demystifing LLMs and Threats by Caleb Sima

Nov 5, 202324 min

S1 Ep 145EP145 Cloud Security: Shared Responsibility, Shared Fate, Shared Faith?

Guest: Jay Thoden van Velzen, Strategic Advisor to the CSO, SAP Topics: What are the challenges with shared responsibility for cloud security? Can you explain "shared" vs "separated" responsibility? In your article, you mention "shared faith", we have "shared fate", but we never heard of shared faith. What is this? Can you explain? What about the cloud models (SaaS, PaaS, IaaS), how does this sharing model differ? While at it, what is cloud, really? [yes, we really did ask this!] Resources: LinkedIn post and Blog EP132 Chaos Engineering for Security: How to Improve Software Resilience with Kelly Shortridge "Security Chaos Engineering" book Shared responsibility failures blog Shared fate at Google Cloud (also see blogs one and two) National Cyber Security strategy

Oct 29, 202320 min

S1 Ep 144EP144 LLMs: A Double-Edged Sword for Cloud Security? Weighing the Benefits and Risks of Large Language Models

Guest: Kathryn Shih, Group Product Manager, LLM Lead in Google Cloud Security Topics: Could you give our audience the quick version of what is an LLM and what things can they do vs not do? Is this "baby AGI" or is this a glorified "autocomplete"? Let's talk about the different ways to tune the models, and when we think about tuning what are the ways that attackers might influence or steal our data? Can you help our security listener leaders have the right vocabulary and concepts to reason about the risk of their information a) going into an LLM and b) getting regurgitated by one? How do I keep the output of a model safe, and what questions do I need to ask a vendor to understand if they're a) talking nonsense or b) actually keeping their output safe? Are hallucinations inherent to LLMs and can they ever be fixed? So there are risks to data and new opportunities for attacks and hallucinations. How do we know good opportunities in the area given the risks? Resources: Retrieval Augmented Generation (or go ask Bard about it) "New Paper: "Securing AI: Similar or Different?"" blog

Oct 23, 202329 min

S1 Ep 143EP143 Cloud Security Remediation: The Biggest Headache?

Guests: Tomer Schwartz, Dazz CTO Topics: It seems that in many cases the challenge with cloud configuration weaknesses is not their detection, but remediation, is that true? As far as remediation scope, do we need to cover traditional vulnerabilities (in stock and custom code), configuration weaknesses and other issues too? One of us used to cover vulnerability management at Gartner, and in many cases the remediation failures [on premise] were due to process, not technology, breakdowns. Is this the same in the cloud? If still true, how can any vendor technology help resolve it? Why is cloud security remediation such a headache for so many organizations? Is the friction real between security and engineering teams? Do they have any hope of ever becoming BFFs? Doesn't every CSPM (and now ASPM too?) vendor say they do automated remediation today? How should security pros evaluate solutions for prioritizing, triaging, and fixing issues? Resources: Video (YouTube, LinkedIn) Cloud Security Remediation for Dummies EP3 Automate and/or Die? EP67 Cyber Defense Matrix and Does Cloud Security Have to DIE to Win?' EP54 Container Security: The Past or The Future? EP138 Terraform for Security Teams: How to Use IaC to Secure the Cloud EP117 Can a Small Team Adopt an Engineering-Centric Approach to Cybersecurity? A Guide to Building a Secure SDLC 8 Megatrends drive cloud adoption—and improve security for all

Oct 16, 202325 min

S1 Ep 142EP142 Cloud Security Podcast Ask Me Anything #AMA 2023

Host: Stephanie Wong, Product Manager, Google Cloud Guests (yes, really, we are the guests!): Anton Chuvakin Tim Peacock Topics: Could you tell us how you ended up in security? What was the moment you realized that Cloud security was different from well, regular, security? Anton is always asking this "3AM test", where did that come from? How do you source topics for the podcast? What advice would you give to folks who are interested in getting into security? … and other fun questions! Resources: Video (LinkedIn, YouTube) Cloud Security Podcast by Google / Twitter / LinkedIn

Oct 9, 202332 min

S1 Ep 141EP141 Cloud Security Coast to Coast: From 2015 to 2023, What's Changed and What's the Same?

Guest: Jeremiah Kung, Global Head of Information Security, AppLovin Topics: Before we dive into all of the awesome cloud migrations you've experienced and your learnings there, could we start with a topic of East vs West CISO mentality? We are talking to more and more CISOs who see the cloud as a net win for security. What's your take on whether the cloud improves security? We talked about doing some "big" cloud migrations, could you talk about what you learned back in 2015 about the "right" way to do a cloud migration and how you've applied those lessons since? How are you approaching securing clouds differently in 2023 (vs the dark past of 2015)? What advice would you give your peers to get out of the "saying no" mentality and into a better collaborative mode? On the topic of giving advice to people who haven't asked for it, what advice would you give to teams who are stuck in 1990s thinking when it comes to lift and shifting their security technology stack to cloud? Resources: EP104 CISO Walks Into the Cloud: And The Magic Starts to Happen! EP129 How CISO Cloud Dreams and Realities Collide EP104 CISO Walks Into the Cloud: And The Magic Starts to Happen! EP11 Preparing for Cloud Migrations from a CISO Perspective, Part 2 "How CISOs need to adapt their mental models for cloud security" blog "Superforecasting" book "American Generalship" book

Oct 2, 202325 min

S1 Ep 140EP140 System Hardening at Google Scale: New Challenges, New Solutions

Guest: Andrew Hoying, Senior Security Engineering Manager @ Google Topics: What is different about system hardening today vs 20 years ago? Also, what is special about hardening systems at Google massive scale? Can I just apply CIS templates and be done with it? Part of hardening has to be following up with developers after they have un-hardened things – how do we operationalize that at scale without getting too much in the way of productivity? A part of hardening has got to be responding to new regulation and compliance regimes, how do you incorporate new controls and stay responsive to the changing world around us? Are there cases where we have taken lessons from hardening at scale and converted those into product improvements? What metrics do you track to keep your teams moving, and what metrics do your leads look at to understand how you're doing? [Spoiler: the answer here is VERY fun!] Resources: "Why Shared Fate is a Better Way to Manage Cloud Risk" article (and this too) CIS for GCP GCP IAM Deny CloudSecList by Marco Lancini

Sep 25, 202327 min

S1 Ep 139EP139 What is Chronicle? Beyond XDR and into the Next Generation of Security Operations

Guest: Chris Corde, Sr Director of Product Management - Security Operations, Google Cloud Topics: You cover many products, but let's focus on Chronicle today. An easy question: Chronicle isn't an XDR, so what is it? Since you've joined the team, what're you most proud of shipping to clients? Could you share more about the Mandiant acquisition, what's been a happy surprise and what are you looking forward to making available to customers? Some believe that good security operations success is mostly about process, yet we are also building these amazing products. What is your view of how much security ops success hinges on products vs practices? When it comes to building out Chronicle's position in the market, how are we leveraging the depth of expertise that people have with other SIEM tools compared to ours? What advice do you have for security professionals who want to transition into product management? Resources: EP44 Evolving a SIEM for the Future While Learning from the Past EP82 Mega-confused by XDR? You Are Not Alone! This XDR Skeptic Clarifies!

Sep 18, 202324 min

S1 Ep 138EP138 Terraform for Security Teams: How to Use IaC to Secure the Cloud

Guest: Rosemary Wang, Developer Advocate at HashiCorp Topics: Could you give us a 2 minute picture on what Terraform is, what stages of the cloud lifecycle it is relevant for, and how it intersects with security teams? How can Terraform be used for security automation? How should security teams work with DevOps teams to use it? What are some of the obvious and not so obvious security challenges of using Terraform? How can security best practices be applied to infrastructure instantiated via Terraform? What is the relationship between Terraform and policy as code (PaC)? How do you get started with all this? What do you tell the security teams who want to do cloud security the "old way" and not the cloud-native way? Resources: Video (LinkedIn, YouTube) "EP126 What is Policy as Code and How Can It Help You Secure Your Cloud Environment?" Policy as Code with HashiCorp Sentinel or Open Policy Agent (OPA) for Terraform "Terraform Cloud adds Vault-backed dynamic credentials" blog Google Cloud Provider for Terraform Security & Authentication Providers for Terraform "Sloth's Guide to Mindfulness" book

Sep 11, 202330 min

S1 Ep 137EP137 Next 2023 Special: Conference Recap - AI, Cloud, Security, Magical Hallway Conversations

Guests: no guests, all banter, all very fun :-) Topics: How is Google Next this year? What is new in cloud security? Is Google finally a security vendor? What are some of the fun security presentations we've seen, including our own? Any impactful launches in security? What was the most interesting overall? Resources: "Next 2023 Special: Building AI-powered Security Tools - How Do We Do It?" (ep136) "RSA 2023 - What We Saw, What We Learned, and What We're Excited About" (ep119) "Cyber Defense Matrix and Does Cloud Security Have to DIE to Win?" (ep67) "Detecting, investigating, and responding to threats in your Google Cloud environment" at Cloud Next 2023 by Anton "Prevent cloud compromises: Learn how Uber discovers cyber risks and remediates threats" at Cloud Next 2023 by Tim "Generative AI for defenders with Sec-PaLM 2 and Duet AI" at Cloud Next 2023 by Eric Doerr (his episode) "A blueprint for modern security operations" at Cloud Next 2023 by our future guest, Chris… Kevin Mandia at Next keynote (start at 1:15:00) "New AI capabilities that can help address your security challenges" blog

Sep 5, 202323 min

S1 Ep 136EP136 Next 2023 Special: Building AI-powered Security Tools - How We Do It?

Guest: Eric Doerr, VP of Engineering, Google Cloud Security Topics: You have a Next presentation on AI, what is the most exciting part for you? We care both about securing AI and using AI for security. How do you organize your thinking about it? Executive surveys imply that trusting an AI (for business) is still an issue. How can we trust AI for security? What does it mean to "trust AI" in this context? How should defenders think about threat modeling AI systems? Back to using AI for security, what are the absolute worst security use cases for GenAI? Think "generate code and run it on prod" or something like that? What does it mean to "teach AI security" like we did with Sec-PALM2? What is actually involved in this? What were some surprising challenges we ran into here? Resources: "Generative AI for defenders with Sec-PaLM 2 and Duet AI" presentation at Google Cloud Next 2023 "The Prompt: What to think about when you're thinking about securing AI" and a new paper on securing AI "AI and Security: The Good, the Bad, and the Magical" (ep135) Monitor and secure Vertex AI "Introducing Google's Secure AI Framework" blog "Project Hail Mary" book

Aug 28, 202321 min

S1 Ep 135EP135 AI and Security: The Good, the Bad, and the Magical

Guest: Phil Venables (@philvenables), Vice President, Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) @ Google Cloud Topics: Why is AI a game-changer for security? Can we even have game-changers in cyber security? Is it more detection or is it more reducing toil and making humans more productuve? What are you favorite AI for security use cases? What "AI + security" issue makes you - a classic CISO question here - lose sleep at night? Does AI help defenders or attackers more? Won't attackers adopt faster because they don't have as many rules (but yes, they have bosses and budgets too)? Aren't there cases where defenders benefit a lot more and gain a superpower with AI while attackers are faced with defeat? Is securing AI more similar or more different from securing other enterprise systems? Does shared fate apply to AI? Resources: "Securing AI: Similar or Different?" paper by Office of the CISO at Google Cloud "Secure AI Framework Approach" Supercharge security with AI Board of Directors Insights Hub "Lessons from the future: Why shared fate shows us a better cloud roadmap" blog "Megatrends, Macro-changes, Microservices, Oh My! Changes in 2022 and Beyond in Cloud Security" (ep47) "Securing Multi-Cloud from a CISO Perspective, Part 3" (ep22) "Google Cybersecurity Action Team: What's the Story?" (ep37) "Google Cybersecurity Action Team: One Year Later!" (ep90)

Aug 21, 202325 min

S1 Ep 134EP134 How to Prioritize UX and Security in the Cloud: UX as a Security Capability

Guest: Steph Hay , Director of UX, Google Cloud Security Topics: The importance of User Experience (UX) in security is so obvious – though it isn't to a lot of people! Could we talk about the importance of UX in security? UX and security in general have an uneasy relationship, and security is harmed by bad UX, it also feels like bad UX can be a security issue. What is your take on this? How do you think about prioritizing your team's time between day zero vs day n experiences for users of security tools? Some say that cloud security should be invisible, but does this mean no UX at all? What are the intersections between UX for security and invisible security? Can you think of what single UX change in Cloud Security's portfolio made the biggest impact to actual security outcomes? We have this new tool/approach for planning called Jobs To Be Done (JTBD) - give us the value, and the history? In the world of JTBD planning, what gets better? Resources: JTBD Framework GCP IAM Recommender Recaptha Enterprise

Aug 14, 202326 min

S1 Ep 133EP133 The Shared Problem of Alerting: More SRE Lessons for Security

Guest: Steve McGhee, Reliability Advocate at Google Cloud Aron Eidelman, Developer Relations Engineer at Google Cloud Topics: What is the shared problem for SRE and security when it comes to alerting? Why is there reluctance to reduce noise? How do SREs, security practitioners, and other stakeholders define "incident" and "risk"? How does involving an "adversary" change the way people think about an incident, even if the impact is identical? Which SRE alerting lessons do NOT apply at all for security? Resources: Video (LinkedIn, YouTube) "Deploy Security Capabilities at Scale: SRE Explains How" (ep85) Steve talk about probability and SLO math at SLOconf Why Focus on Symptoms, Not Causes? Learning from incidents (LFI) science How to measure anything in cyber security risk book Security chaos engineering book The SRS Book Ch 1 The SRE book Ch 4

Aug 7, 202335 min

S1 Ep 132EP132 Chaos Engineering for Security: How to Improve Software Resilience with Kelly Shortridge

Guest: Kelly Shortridge, Senior Principal Engineer in the Office of the CTO at Fastly Topics: So what is Security Chaos Engineering? "Chapter 5. Operating and Observing" is Anton's favorite. One thing that mystifies me, however, is that you outline how to fail with alerts (send too many), but it is not entirely clear how to practically succeed with them? How does chaos engineering help security alerting / detection? How chaos engineering (or is it really about software resilience?) intersects with Cloud security - is this peanut butter and chocolate or more like peanut butter and pickles? How can organizations get started with chaos engineering for software resilience and security? What is your favorite chaos engineering experiment that you have ever done? We often talk about using the SRE lessons for security, and yet many organizations do security the 1990s way. Are there ways to use chaos engineering as a forcing function to break people out of their 1990s thinking and time warp them to 2023? Resources: Video (LinkedIn, YouTube) "Security Chaos Engineering: Sustaining Resilience in Software and Systems" by Kelly Shortridge, Aaron Rinehart "Cybersecurity Myths and Misconceptions" book "Designing Data-Intensive Applications: The Big Ideas Behind Reliable, Scalable, and Maintainable Systems" book "Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies" book "Deploy Security Capabilities at Scale: SRE Explains How" (ep85) "The Good, the Bad, and the Epic of Threat Detection at Scale with Panther" (ep123) "Can a Small Team Adopt an Engineering-Centric Approach to Cybersecurity?" (ep117) IKEA Effect "Modernizing SOC ... Introducing Autonomic Security Operations" blog

Jul 31, 202336 min