
Cloud Security Podcast by Google
295 episodes — Page 5 of 6
S1 Ep 93EP93 CISO Walks Into the Cloud: Frustrations, Successes, Lessons ... And Is My Data Secure?
Guest: Alicja Cade, Director for Financial Services, Office of the CISO, Google Cloud Topics: We are talking about your journey as a CISO migrating to the cloud. Could you give us the overview of … What triggered your organization's migration to the cloud? When did you and the security team get brought in? Did you take going to the cloud as an opportunity to change things beyond the tools you were using? As you got going into the cloud, what was the hardest part for your organization? If that was hardest, what was most surprising? Good surprise and bad surprise? How did you design security controls for the cloud? How do you validate and verify security controls in the cloud? How did you keep both security practitioners and the rest of your IT teams from lift-and-shift thinking? Did your data security practice change? Having covered all that tactical terrain, one final strategic question: is moving to the cloud a net risk reduction? Can it be? Resources: "CISO Walks Into the Cloud: Frustrations, Successes, Lessons ... And Does the Risk Change?" (ep80) "Visualizing Google Cloud: 101 Illustrated References for Cloud Engineers and Architects" by Priyanka Vergadia "Cyberpolitics in International Relations" book CSA CCM v4 Cyber Risk Institute "Modernize Data Security with Autonomic Data Security Approach" (ep79) and the paper on autonomic data security. "Preparing for Cloud Migrations from a CISO Perspective, Part 1" (ep5) "Preparing for Cloud Migrations from a CISO Perspective, Part 2" (ep11) "How CISOs need to adapt their mental models for cloud security" blog
S1 Ep 92Special: Sharing The Mic In Cyber with STMIC Hosts Lauren and Christina: Representation, Psychological Safety, Security
Guests: Lauren Zabierek (@lzxdc), Acting Executive Director of the Belfer Center at the Harvard Kennedy School Christina Morillo (@divinetechygirl), Principal Security Consultant at Trimark Security Topics: We are so excited to have you on the show today talking about your awesome effort, Share The Mic in Cyber. I love that we are Sharing our Mic with you today. Could you please introduce yourself to our listeners? Let's talk about representation and what that means, and why it's especially relevant in cyber security? Psychological safety is super important for so many reasons, including in cyber. Could you share a definition of what it is, and why it is important? Can we talk about how psychological safety and representation intersect? Let's bring things back to talk about the #ShareTheMicInCyber / #STMIC project. Could you tell us about one of your favorite things that's come from the project? Any surprises? Lessons? Plans? Futures? How can our listeners help with #ShareTheMicInCyber? Where to learn more? Resources: #ShareTheMicInCyber site and @ShareInCyber on social Lauren Zabierek (@lzxdc), #ShareTheMic in Cyber co-founder Camille Stewart Gloster (@camilleesq), #ShareTheMic in Cyber co-founder "Missing Diversity Hurts Your Security" (ep42) NEXT Special - Cloud Security and DEI: Being an Ally! (ep36)
S1 Ep 91EP91 "Hacking Google", Op Aurora and Insider Threat at Google
Guest: Mike Sinno, Security Engineering Director, Detection and Response @ Google Topics: You recently were featured in "Hacking Google" videos, can you share a bit about this effort and what role you played? How long have you been at Google? What were you doing before, if you can remember after all your time here? What brought you to Google? We hear you now focus on insider threats. Insider threat is back in the news, do you find this surprising? A classic insider question is about "malicious vs well-meaning insiders" and which type is a bigger risk. What is your take here? Trust is the most important thing when people think about Google, we protect their correspondence, their photos, their private thoughts they search for. What role does detection and response play in protecting user trust? One fun thing about working at Google is our tech stack. Your team uses one of our favorite tools in the D&R org! Can you tell us about BrainAuth and how it finds useful things? We talked about Google D&R (ep 17 and ep 75) and the role of automation came up many times. And automation is a key topic for a lot of our cloud customers. What do you automate in your domain of D&R? Resources: "Hacking Google" videos (EP00 with Mike) The Secure Reliable Systems book The CERT Guide to Insider Threats book Common Sense Guide to Mitigating Insider Threats book Insider Threats (Cornell Studies in Security Affairs) Foreign Espionage in Cyberspace from the NCSC "How We Scale Detection and Response at Google: Automation, Metrics, Toil" (ep75) "Modern Threat Detection at Google" (ep17)
S1 Ep 90Next 2022 Google Cybersecurity Action Team: One Year Later!
Guest: Phil Venables, Vice President and CISO at Google Cloud Topics: Google Cybersecurity Action Team is your brainchild and it is 1 year old, what comes to mind first when we reflect on this anniversary? The team is primarily about helping clients with security, what did we learn doing this for a year? What challenges have we (Google Cybersecurity Action Team) faced in our first year? We released 4 Threat Horizons reports this year, what is the future for this research here? We often hear that in the cloud we need to move away from products towards solutions, how does that work in security? Your famous 8 megatrends post is several months old - any new thoughts or changes coming to this concept? Recently you had a very interesting blog "Crucial Questions from CISOs and Security Teams", with a list of questions, can you share some of your thinking here? Resources: Security at Google Cloud Next 2022 Next Special - Log4j Reflections, Software Dependencies and Open Source Security Next Special - Improving Browser Security in the New Era of Work Next Special - Can We Escape Ransomware by Migrating to the Cloud? NEXT Special - Google Cybersecurity Action Team: What's the Story? (Next 2021 special episode) Modernizing SOC ... Introducing Autonomic Security Operations How autonomic data security can help define cloud's future Google Cloud Threat Horizons Report #1 #2 #3 #4 8 Megatrends drive cloud adoption—and improve security for all "Demystify Data Sovereignty and Sovereign Cloud Secrets at Google Cloud" (ep81) Crucial Questions from CISOs and Security Teams Google Cybersecurity Action Team
S1 Ep 89Next 2022 Can We Escape Ransomware by Migrating to the Cloud?
Guest: Nelly Kassem, Security and Compliance Specialist @ Google Cloud Topics: Why did ransomware attacks become so popular? What type of organizations are targeted by ransomware? Do these affect mostly the organizations with sub-par security? Ransomware has been raging since 2015 and shows few signs of subsiding. Why are these attacks still successful? Do we see ransomware in the cloud? Does migrating to the cloud protect you from ransomware? Which of Google Cloud tools are useful to fight ransomware? Resources: Security at Google Cloud Next 2022 Next Special - Log4j Reflections, Software Dependencies and Open Source Security Next Special - Improving Browser Security in the New Era of Work "Future of EDR: Is It Reason-able to Suggest XDR?" (ep29) "2021: Phishing is Solved?" (ep40) Mandiant M-Trends 2022 Google Cloud Threat Horizons Report #1 #2 #3 #4
S1 Ep 88Next 2022 Improving Browser Security in the New Era of Work
Guest: Fletcher Oliver, Chrome Browser Customer Engineer, Google Topics: What is browser security? Isn't it just application security by another name? Why is browser security more important now than ever? Do we have statistical measures or data that tell us if we're succeeding at browser security? Do we know if we're doing a good job at making this better? What are the components of modern browser security? How does this work with an enterprise's existing stack? In fact, how does this work with the rest of Google's tooling? Resources: Security at Google Cloud Next 2022 NEXT Special - Log4j Reflections, Software Dependencies and Open Source Security Chrome releases blog Chrome Enterprise
S1 Ep 87Next 2022 Log4j Reflections, Software Dependencies and Open Source Security
Guest: Dr Nicky Ringland, Product Manager for Open Source Insights, Google Topics: Let's talk Open Source Software - are all these dependencies dependable? Why was log4j such a big thing - at a whole ecosystem level? Was it actually a Java / Maven problem? Are other languages "better" or more secure? Is another log4j inevitable? What can organizations to minimise their own risks? Resources: Google Cloud Next 2022 Open Source Insights at deps.dev Blog at blog.deps.dev with posts on Understanding the Impact of Apache Log4j Vulnerability and what happens After the Advisory Assured Open Source Software service
S1 Ep 86EP86 How to Apply Lessons from Virtualization Transition to Make Cloud Transformation Better
Guest: Thiébaut Meyer, Director at Office of the CISO, Google Cloud Topics: Virtualization's arrival caused a major IT upheaval 20 years ago. What can we learn from that revolution for our current cloud transformation? We talk about our three legged security stool of people/process/technology. How do we balance the technical issues (new technology stack, etc.) with the new processes (agile, etc) and the skills? What are the cultural and people transformation differences between the virtualization and cloud revolutions? We do recall how PCI DSS was disrupted by virtualization. So, how does regulation play into this change - back then and now with the cloud? How do we change the minds of regulators who still think that cloud is a risk to mitigate, rather than a way to mitigate others risks better? Resources: "8 Megatrends drive cloud adoption—and improve security for all" blog "Demystifying 'shared Fate' - A New Approach To Understand Cybersecurity" Transform with Google Cloud Google Cybersecurity Action Team
S1 Ep 85EP85 Deploy Security Capabilities at Scale: SRE Explains How
Guest: Steve McGhee, Reliability Advocate, Google Cloud Topics: What can security teams learn from the Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) art of rapid and safe deployment? Is this all about the process or do SREs possess some magical technology to do this? What is SRE approach to automation? What are the pillars / components of SRE approach to deployment? SRE is also about scaling. Some security teams have to manage 1000s of detection rules, how can this be done in a manner that does not conflict or cause other problems? Resources: Google SRE book A companion Google SRE workbook "How We Scale Detection and Response at Google: Automation, Metrics, Toil" (ep75) "Achieving Autonomic Security Operations: Why metrics matter (but not how you think)" blog "Achieving Autonomic Security Operations: Reducing toil" blog.
S1 Ep 84EP84 How to Secure Artificial Intelligence (AI): Threats, Approaches, Lessons So Far
Guest: Alex Polyakov, CEO of Adversa.ai Topics: You did research by analyzing 2000 papers on AI attacks released in the previous decade. What are the main insights? How do you approach discovering the relevant threat models for various AI systems and scenarios? Which threats are real today vs in a few years? What are the common attack vectors? What do you see in the field of supply chain attacks on AI, software supply, data? All these reported cyberphysical attacks on computer vision, how real are they, and what are the possible examples of exploitation? Are they a real danger to people? What are the main differences between protecting AI vs protecting traditional enterprise applications? Who should be responsible for Securing AI? What about for building trustworthy AI? Given that the machinery of AI is often opaque, how to go about discovering vulnerabilities? Is there responsible disclosure for AI vulnerabilities, such as in open-source models and in public APIs? What should companies do first, when embarking on an AI security program? Who should have such a program? Resources: "EP52 Securing AI with DeepMind CISO" (ep52) "EP68 How We Attack AI? Learn More at Our RSA Panel!" (ep68) Adversarial AI attacks work on Humans (!) "Maverick* Research: Your Smart Machine Has Been Conned! Now What?" (2015) "The Road to Secure and Trusted AI" by Adversa AI "Towards Trusted AI Week 37 – What are the security principles of AI and ML?" Adversa AI blog AIAAIC Repository Machine Learning Security Evasion Competition at MLSec
S1 Ep 83EP83 What Does reCAPTCHA Actually Do and How Does It Do it? Product Manager Explains
Guest: Badr Salmi, Product Manager for reCAPTCHA Topics: What is reCAPTCHA? Aren't you guys the super annoying 'click on the busses' thing? What is account defender? Why was this a natural next step for you? What are the actual threats that this handles - and handles well? Specific web attacks? Web fraud? Let's talk about account fraud, what do these attacks look like and how do bad guys monetize today? What about payment fraud? Could you score a payment session as well as a login session risk, or is that different? How does this work with multi factor authentication? Recommended reading: "Code" book Recapcha page "Protect your users' accounts with reCAPTCHA Enterprise's account defender" blog "Double-clicking, but not on fire hydrants, with bot fighters" (ep19)
S1 Ep 82EP82 Mega-confused by XDR? You Are Not Alone! This XDR Skeptic Clarifies!
Guest: Dimitri McKay, Principal Security Strategist @ Splunk Topics: How do you define that "XDR thing" that you are so skeptical about? So within that definition of XDR, you think it's not so great, why? If you have to argue pro-XDR, what would you say? Two main XDR camps are "XDR as EDR+" and "XDR as SIEM-", which camp do you think is more right? Are both wrong? What approach do you think is more useful as a lens to understand the potential upsides/downsides of XDR? What about the cloud? "Cloud XDR" seems a bit illogical, but what do you think is the future of D&R in the cloud? Resources: "Anton and The Great XDR Debate, Part 1" "Anton and The Great XDR Debate, Part 2" "Anton and The Great XDR Debate, Part 3" SURGe content on splunk blog "Today, You Really Want a SaaS SIEM!" Red Canary 2022 Threat Detection report Verizon DBIR 2022 report.
S1 Ep 81EP81 Demystify Data Sovereignty and Sovereign Cloud Secrets at Google Cloud
Guest: Christopher "CJ" Johnson, retired Fire Chief, and Global Regulated Cloud Product Lead @ Google Cloud Topics: In political science, they define sovereignty as a local monopoly on the legitimate use of force. Why are we talking about "sovereignty" in IT? What is a sovereign cloud? How much of the term is marketing vs engineering? Who cares or should care about sovereign cloud? Is this about technical controls or paper/policy controls? Or both? What is the role for encryption and key management and key access justifications (like say Google Cloud EKM with KAJ) for sovereign cloud? Is sovereign cloud automatically more secure or at least has better data security? What threat models are considered for sovereign cloud technologies? Resources: Google Cloud External Key Manager (EKM) "Trust Google Cloud more with ubiquitous data encryption" blog "Software-Defined community cloud - a new way to "Government Cloud"" blog
S1 Ep 80EP80 CISO Walks Into the Cloud: Frustrations, Successes, Lessons ... And Does the Risk Change?
Guest: David Stone, Staff Consultant at Office of the CISO, Google Cloud Topics: Speaking as a former CISO, what triggered your organization migration to the cloud? When did you and the security organization get brought in? How did you plan your security organization journey to the cloud? Did you take going to Cloud as an opportunity to change things beyond the tools you were using? As you got going into the cloud, what was the hardest part for your organization ? What was most surprising? Good surprise and bad surprise? How did you design security controls for the cloud? How do you validate and verify security controls in the cloud? How did you incorporate your cloud environment into your SOC's responsibility Having covered all that tactical terrain, one final strategic question: is moving to Cloud a net risk reduction? Can it be? Resources: "How CISOs need to adapt their mental models for cloud security" "Megatrends drive cloud adoption—and improve security for all" "EP47 Megatrends, Macro-changes, Microservices, Oh My! Changes in 2022 and Beyond in Cloud Security" (ep47) "CISO's Guide to Cloud Security Transformation" paper [PDF] Google SRE book GCAT site
S1 Ep 79EP79 Modernize Data Security with Autonomic Data Security Approach
Guest: John Stone, Chaos Coordinator @ Office of the CISO, Google Cloud Topics: So what is Autonomic Data Security, described in our just released paper? What are some notorious data security issues today? Perhaps common data security mistakes security leaders commit? What never worked in data security, like say manual data classification? How should organizations think about securing the data they migrated and the data that was created in the cloud? Do you really believe the cloud can make data security better than data security in traditional environments? Resources: "Modern Data Security: A path to autonomic data security" paper (NEW) "How autonomic data security can help define cloud's future" blog "Megatrends drive cloud adoption—and improve security for all" blog "Modernizing SOC ... Introducing Autonomic Security Operations" blog "Autonomic Security Operations: 10X Transformation of the Security Operations Center" paper "Zero Trust: Fast Forward from 2010 to 2021" (ep8) "Data Security in the Cloud" (ep2) and the resource. "Modern Data Security Approaches: Is Cloud More Secure?" (ep16) "Reflections on Trusting Trust" paper (1984).
S1 Ep 78EP78 Classic SOC Meets Cloud: What Changes? What Stays the Same?
Guest: Gorka Sadowski, Chief Strategy Officer @ Exabeam Topics: How do we get a legacy SOC team to think about the cloud? How to think about cloud threat detection, in general? What is different … threats, the environment, what else? What is the same? How do we know which TTPs are relevant for the new environments? What to bring with us to the cloud? Do content/rules and detection engines need to be different to cover the cloud detection use cases? What cases are appropriate for machine learning (ML) in the cloud? Does cloud threats drive the need for new ML detections? Resources: "11 Strategies of a World-Class Cybersecurity Operations Center" paper "Autonomic Security Operations: How to 10X Your SOC" paper "Indicators Of Compromise Vs. Tactics, Techniques, And Procedures" blog "How to Build and Operate a Modern Security Operations Center" (Gartner subscription required) "A SOC Tried To Detect Threats in the Cloud … You Won't Believe What Happened Next" blog
S1 Ep 77EP77 Operational Realities of SOAR: Automate and/or Enrich, Playbooks, Magic
Guest: Cyrus Robinson, SOC Director and IR Team lead at Ingalls Information Security Topics: You've been using SOAR tools for years, so what do you think of the technology so far? What is driving SOAR adoption today? And what is inhibiting SOAR adoption? Realistically, how hard is SOAR to operationalize for a typical company? What are your favorite SOAR playbooks to start with? How to build, train and keep the SOAR team? Do they need to code to succeed? We like the SOAR maturity model approach. How would you imagine a SOAR adoption maturity model? How to implement SOAR from scratch in scaling operations? How to start? How to plan? How to not fail? Resources: "A Simple SOAR Adoption Maturity Model" blog "Planning Is Paramount When Adopting SOAR" blog Siemplify community version
S1 Ep 76EP76 Powering Secure SaaS … But Not with CASB? Cloud Detection and Response?
Guest: Ben Johnson, CTO/co-founder @ Obsidian Security Topics: Why is there so much attention lately on SaaS security? Doesn't this area date back to 2015 or so? What do you see as the primary challenges in securing SaaS? What does a SaaS threat model look like? What are the top threats you see? CASB has been the fastest growing security market and it has grown into a broad platform and many assume that "securing SaaS = using CASB", what are they missing? Where would another technology to secure SaaS fit architecturally, inline with CASB or as another API-based system? Securing IaaS spanned a robust ecosystem of vendors (CWPP, CSPM, now CNAPP) and many of these have ambitions for securing SaaS, thus clashing with CASB. Where do you fit in this battle? For a while, you were talking more about CDR - what is it and do we really need a separate CDR technology? Resources: Obsidian Security blog and Resource Center Does the World Need Cloud Detection and Response (CDR)? blog Does the world need Cloud Detection and Response (CDR) as a new market segment? poll MITRE ATT&CK for SaaS matrix CISA SCUBA resource "Essentialism" book.
S1 Ep 75EP75 How We Scale Detection and Response at Google: Automation, Metrics, Toil
Guest: Tim Nguyen, Director of Detection and Response @ Google Topics: I know we don't like to say "SOC" here, so why don't we talk about the role of automation in detection and response (D&R) at Google? One SRE concept we found useful in security operations is "toil" - How do we squeeze toil out of D&R practice at Google? A combined analyst and engineer role (just like an SRE) was critical for both increasing automation and reducing toil, how hard was it to put this into practice? Tell us about that journey? How do we automate security signal analysis, can you give us a few examples? D&R metrics have been a big pain point for many organizations, how does SRE thinking of SLOs and SLIs (and less about SLAs) helps us in our "not SOC"? How do we avoid falling into the "time to respond" trap that rewards fast response, sometimes at the cost of good? Resource: SRE book, Chapter 5 - Eliminating Toil SRE book, Chapter 4 - Service Level Objectives "Building Secure and Reliable Systems" book "Achieving Autonomic Security Operations: Automation as a Force Multiplier" "Achieving Autonomic Security Operations: Reducing toil" "Taking an autonomic approach to security operations" video "Modern Threat Detection at Google" (ep17)
S1 Ep 74EP74 Who Will Solve Cloud Security: A View from Google Investment Side
Guest: James Luo, Partner @ CapitalG Topics: You've looked at hundreds of security startups at the growth stage - what is getting funded? What is not getting funded? What is the difference? What's your view on the current market environment for security companies? Is security "recession-proof", whatever that means? How do you think about what problems are worth solving with a new venture vs existing vendors (and/or CSPs) expanding to cover the new area? Why do many cloud security vendors get funded and get high valuations while there is a wide perception that CSP (like us at Google) are doing security really well? How do we solve the challenge that many organizations are barely moving off "antivirus and firewalls" security of the 1990s? What is your best advice to cloud security startups trying to get wider adoption? Resources: "Demystifying 'shared Fate' - A New Approach To Understand Cybersecurity" CapitalG blog
S1 Ep 73EP73 Your SOC Is Dead? Evolve to Output-driven Detect and Respond!
Guest: Erik Bloch, Senior Director of Detection and Response at Sprinklr Topics: You recently coined a concept of "output-driven Detection and Response" and even perhaps broader "output-driven security." What is it and how does it work? Detection and response is alive (obviously), but sometimes you say SOC is dead, what do you mean by that? You refer to a federated approach for Detection and Response" ("route the outcomes to the teams that need them or can address them"), but is it workable for any organization? What about the separation of duty concerns that some raise in response to this? What about the organizations that don't have any security talent in those teams? Is the approach you advocate "cloud native"? Does it only work in the cloud? Can a traditional, on-premise focused organization use it? The model of "security team as a decision-maker, not an implementer" has a bit of a painful history, as this is what led to "GRC-only teams" who lack any technical knowledge. Why will this approach work this time? Resources: "RIP SOC. Hello D-IR" "Kill your SOC with a D-IR model" "Security De-Engineering: Solving the Problems in Information Risk Management" book "A SOCless Detection Team at Netflix" "Achieving Autonomic Security Operations: Automation as a Force Multiplier" "Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action" book "Think Like a Monk: The Secret of how to Harness the Power of Positivity and be Happy Now" book "On "Output-driven" SIEM" "SOC is Not Dead: How to Grow and Develop Your SOC for Cloud and Beyond" (ep58)
S1 Ep 72EP72 What Does Good Detection and Response Look Like in the Cloud? Insights from Expel MDR
Guests: Dave "Merk" Merkel, CEO @ Expel Peter Silberman, CTO @ Expel Topics: Many MDRs claim to be "security from the cloud", but they actually don't know much about cloud security. What does good looks like for MDR in the cloud (cloud being a full range from IaaS to SaaS)? What are the key challenges for clients picking an MDR for their cloud environments? What are the questions to ask your potential MDR? Do clients want the same security outcomes done in the cloud vs on-premise? Does it mean that MSSP/MDR capabilities must be different for good coverage of the cloud? Is MDR technology different for Cloud detection and response as opposed to on-prem D&R? How do you communicate with clients about the importance and value of cloud specific detection vs detection for endpoints running in the cloud? What are the top threats against client cloud environments that you see, detect and protect from? Which clouds (IaaS?) are easiest for MDR to protect? What makes them easier to handle than the other Clouds? Resources: Who Does What In Cloud Threat Detection? How to Think about Threat Detection in the Cloud Cattle vs Pets reminder Expel Blog - Incident report: Spotting an attacker in GCP Expel Great eXpeltations 2022: Cybersecurity trends and predictions Expel Quarterly Threat Report: Q1 2022
S1 Ep 71EP71 Attacking Google to Defend Google: How Google Does Red Team
Guest: Stefan Friedli, Senior Security Engineer @ Google Topics: What is our "red team" testing philosophy and approach at Google? How did we evolve to this approach? What is the path from testing to making Google and our users more secure? How does our testing power the improvements we make? What is unique about red teaming at Google? Care to share some fun testing stories or examples from your experience? Resources: "Building Secure & Reliable Systems" book (free) Threat Analysis Group (TAG) blog
S1 Ep 70EP70 Special - RSA 2022 Reflections - Securing the Past vs Securing the Future
Guests: none Topics: What have we seen at the RSA 2022 Conference? What was the most interesting and unexpected? What was missing? Resources: "RSA 2022 Musings: The Past and The Future of Security" Google Cloud Security at RSA 2022
S1 Ep 69EP69 Cloud Threats and How to Observe Them
Guest: James Condon, Director of Security Research @ Lacework Topics: What are realistic and actually observed cloud threats today? How did you observe them at Lacework? Cloud threats: are they on-premise style threats to cloud assets? We hate the line "cloud is just somebody else's computer" but apparently threats actors seem to think so? What is the 2nd most dangerous cloud issue after configuration mistakes? Why is it so common for organizations to have insecure configurations in their cloud environments? Give me a few examples of the most common mistakes organizations make, and what they can do to avoid those configurations. Cloud malware and ransomware / RansomOps, are these real risks today? Are we finally seeing the rise of Linux malware at scale (in the cloud)? As multi cloud expands in popularity, what are threat actors doing in this area? Are actors customizing their attacks on a per-cloud basis (AWS, GCP, Azure)? Resources: Lacework 2022 Cloud Threat Report "Securing DevOps: Security in the Cloud" book "Threat Models and Cloud Security" (ep12) Google Threat Horizons Report #1 Google Threat Horizons Report #2
S1 Ep 68EP68 How We Attack AI? Learn More at Our RSA Panel!
Guest: Nicholas Carlini, Research Scientist @ Google Topics: What is your threat model for a large-scale AI system? How do you approach this problem? How do you rank the attacks? How do you judge if an attack is something to mitigate? How do you separate realistic from theoretical? Are there AI threats that were theoretical in 2020, but may become a daily occurrence in 2025? What are the threat-derived lessons for securing AI? Do we practice the same or different approaches for secure AI and reliable AI? How does relative lack of transparency in AI helps (or hurts?) attackers and defenders? Resources: "Red Teaming AI Systems: The Path, the Prospect and the Perils" at RSA 2022 "Killed by AI Much? A Rise of Non-deterministic Security!" Books on Adversarial ML
S1 Ep 67EP67 Cyber Defense Matrix and Does Cloud Security Have to DIE to Win?
Guest: Sounil Yu, CISO and Head of Research at JupiterOne Topics: How does your Cyber Defense Matrix apply to cloud security? Are things easier or harder? Cloud (at least the cloudy-cloud, also called cloud native) definitely supports "Distributed Immutable Ephemeral" (DIE) - your new creation, how does that change security and CDM? Cyber resilience generates a lot of confusion, how do you define and describe it? BTW, is the cloud more or less cyber resilient based on your definition? Is invisible security a good thing? Can we ever have it? When should security be visible? Intuitively, security and safety are not the same. So, what is the difference between cyber safety and cyber security? What is cyber safety, really? Resources: Cyber Defense Matrix Security DIE Triad Container Security: The Past or The Future? (ep54) This Binary Legit? How Google Uses Binary Authorization and Code Provenance (ep66) What is the useful definition of "cyber resilience"? poll Is the cloud just somebody else's computer? Poll Cattle vs Pets - DevOps Explained Gartner CIA-PSR model The 2022 State of Cyber Assets Report Cyber Defense Matrix: The Essential Guide to Navigating the Cybersecurity Landscape "Antifragile" book "Thinking, Fast and Slow" book "Security Chaos Engineering" book
S1 Ep 66EP66 Is This Binary Legit? How Google Uses Binary Authorization and Code Provenance
Guest: Sandra Guo, Product Manager in Security, Google Cloud Topics: We have a really interesting problem here: if we make great investments in our use of trusted repositories, and great investments in doing code review on every change, and securing our build systems, and having reproducible builds, how do we know that all of what we did upstream is actually what gets deployed to production? What are the realistic threats that Binary Authorization handles? Are there specific organizations that are more at risk from those? What's the Google inspiration for this work, both development and adoption? How do we make this work in practice at a real organization that is not Google? Where do you see organizations "getting it wrong" and where do you see organizations "getting it right"? We've had a lot of conversations about rolling out zero-trust for enterprise applications, how do those lessons (start small, be visible, plan plan plan) translate into deploying Binauthz into blocking mode? Resources: "Binary Authorization for Borg: how Google verifies code provenance and implements code identity" paper Binary Authorization for deploying trusted images DevOps & SRE at Google
S1 Ep 65EP65 Is Your Healthcare Security Healthy? Mandiant Incident Response Insights
Guests: Charles Carmakal, CTO at Mandiant Taylor Lehmann, Director at Office of the CISO, Google Cloud Topics: What are the current "popular" incidents at healthcare providers that you handled? Any of them involve cloud? Do healthcare CISOs have time for anything other than ransomware? Does insider threat matter? What can incident response teach us here? How do you think the threat actors benefit from the health data they steal? Based on your IR experience, what are the more interesting ways in, other than phishing? Give us your IR-informed take on ransomware pay/not pay focused on healthcare, ideally? Resources: "The key role 'visibility' plays in healthcare's cybersecurity resilience" "How healthcare can strengthen its own cybersecurity resilience" "M-Trends 2022: Cyber Security Metrics, Insights and Guidance From the Frontlines" "Future of EDR: Is It Reason-able to Suggest XDR?" (ep29) "MFA fatigue attacks: Users tricked into allowing device access due to overload of push notifications""VS21: A Playbook for Resiliency: Contain and Remediate Ransomware Before It Can Act" "FDA Announces Fix for Pacemaker Security Flaws"
S1 Ep 64EP64 Security Operations Center: The People Side and How to Do it Right
Guest: Dave Herrald @ Principal Security Strategist, Google Cloud Topics: What are some tenets of good SOC training? How does this depend on the SOC model (traditional L1/L2/L3, virtual, etc)? How do you make SOC training realistic? Should training be about the toolset or should it be about the analyst's skills? Should you primarily train for engineering skills or analysis skills? Do you need to code to succeed in a modern SOC? Are competitive events like CTFs effective for SOC training? What role does SOC training play in bringing new, perhaps under-represented people into security operations and promoting inclusivity? Resources: Chris Sanders SOC classes SANS Holiday Hack Challenges SEC450: Blue Team Fundamentals: Security Operations and Analysis SANS NetWars "Autonomic Security Operations: 10X Transformation of the Security Operations Center" paper Boss of the SOC (BOTS) Dataset
S1 Ep 63EP63 State of Autonomic Security Operations: Are There Sharks in Your SOC?
Guests: Robert Herjavec, Founder and CEO of Herjavec Group Eric Foster, President of CYDERES Iman Ghanizada, Global Head of Autonomic Security Operations at Google Cloud. Topics: It's been a few months since we launched Autonomic Security Operations (ASO) and it seems like the whitepaper has been going viral in the industry. Tell us what ASO is about? How was the ASO story received by your customers? Any particular reactions? Will the ASO narrative inspire the next generation of practitioners? Where do you envision the market headed? ASO is about transforming the SOC, and that often involves culture change. How do you change the culture and deeper approaches common in security operations? What else can we do to evolve SOC faster than the threats and assets grow? Resources: This episode is based on a panel from This Google Cloud Security Talks Q1 2022 Panel "All Organizations Should Pursue Autonomic Security Operations… A Fireside Chat with SOC Elites." "All Organizations Should Pursue Autonomic Security Operations… A Fireside Chat with SOC Elites" on YouTube "Autonomic Security Operations: 10X Transformation of the Security Operations Center" paper "Modernizing the U.S. Federal Government's Approach to Cyber Threat Management with Autonomic Security Operations" paper
S1 Ep 62EP62 Protect Modern Applications in the Cloud: Union of APIs and Application Security
Guest: Etienne De Burgh, Senior Security and Compliance Specialist, Office of the CISO @ Google Cloud Topics: Why is API security hot now? What happened that made it a priority for many? Is API security different from application security? Doesn't the first "A" in API stand for application? What are the real threats to exposed APIs? APIs are designed for automated use, so how do you tell automated use from automated abuse / attack? What are the biggest challenges that companies are having with API security? What are the components of API security? Is there a "secure by default API"? API threat detection? Just like cloud in general, API misconfigurations seem to be leading to security problems, are APIs hard to configure securely for most organizations? Resources: Google Cloud Security Summit - come see us on May 17, 2022 "Securing web applications and APIs anywhere" (at our Security Summit) OWASP Top 10 for API Security "Best practices for securing your applications and APIs using Apigee"
S1 Ep 61EP61 Anniversary Episode - What Did We Learn So Far on Cloud Security Podcast?
No guests - just Anton and Tim Topics: Why cloud security? What do we really think about our podcast name and topic, cloud security? Can you once again explain security for the cloud, in the cloud, from the cloud? What is one thing that we learned from doing a podcast? Favorite cloud security trend that we encountered on the podcast? What did we learn about security from organization's migrating to the cloud? What are our favorite reading materials related to cloud security? What are our favorite tips from the guests on securing the cloud? Resources: "The Age of AI And Our Human Future" book "Practical Guide to Cloud Migration – Google - Site Reliability Engineering" (book, free) and other SRE books "Cloud Security podcast by Google turns 46 - Reflections and lessons!" "Cloud Security Podcast by Google — Popular Episodes by Topic" Our video trailer
S1 Ep 60EP60 Impersonating Service Accounts in GCP and Beyond: Cloud Security Is About IAM?
Guest: Dylan Ayrey, cofounder of Truffle Security Topics: Could you explain briefly why identity is so important in the cloud? A skeptic on cloud security once told us that "in the cloud, we are one identity mistake from a breach." Is this true? For listeners who aren't familiar with GCP, could you give us the 30 second story on "what is a service account." How is it different from a regular IAM account? What are service account impersonations? How can I see if my service accounts can be impersonated? How do I detect it? How can I better secure my organization from impersonation attacks? Resources: Truffle Security blog "GCP Lateral Movement And Privileged Escalation Spill Over And Updates From Google" by Dylan Ayrey "Tutorial on privilege escalation and post exploitation tactics in Google Cloud Platform environments" blog "Kat Traxler - Taste the IAM" blogs
S1 Ep 59EP59 Zero Trust: So Easy Even a Government Can Do It?
Guest: Sharon Goldberg, CEO and cofounder of BastionZero and a professor at Boston University Topics: What is your favorite definition of zero trust? You had posted a blog analyzing the whitehouse ZT a memo on the federal government's transition to "zero trust", what caught your eye about the Zero Trust memo and why did you decide to write about it? What's behind the federal government's recommendations to deprecate VPNs and recommend users "authenticate to applications, not networks"? What do these recommendations mean for cloud security, today and in the future? What do you think would be the hardest things to implement in real US Federal IT environments? Are there other recommendations in the memo to think about as organizations design zero trust strategies for their infrastructure? What are some of the challenges of implementing zero trust in general? Resources: "Zero Trust: Fast Forward from 2010 to 2021" (ep8) "Moving the U.S. Government Toward Zero Trust Cybersecurity Principles" "I read the federal government's Zero-Trust Memo so you don't have to" "F12 isn't hacking: Missouri governor threatens to prosecute local journalist for finding exposed state data"
EP0 New Audio Trailer: Cloud Security Podcast by Google
trailerNew Audio Trailer: Cloud Security Podcast by Google
S1 Ep 58EP58 SOC is Not Dead: How to Grow and Develop Your SOC for Cloud and Beyond
Guests: Alexi Wiemer, Senior Manager at Deloitte Cyber Detection and Response Practice Dan Lauritzen, Senior Manager at Deloitte Cloud Security Practice. Topics: What is your key learning about the state of SOC today? What one SOC trend are you hearing the most or most interested in? What is your best advice to SOCs that are permanently and woefully understaffed? Many SOC analysts are drowning in manual work, and it is easy to give advice that "they need to automate." What does this actually entail, in real life? What is, in your view, the most critical technology for a modern SOC? Is it SIEM? Is it SOAR? Is it EDR? What is the best advice for a SOC that was handed cloud on a platter and was told to monitor it for threats? Occasionally, we hear that "SOC is dead." What is your response to such dire SOCless predictions? Resources: "New Paper: "Future Of The SOC: Process Consistency and Creativity: a Delicate Balance" (Paper 3 of 4)" "New Paper: "Future of the SOC: Forces shaping modern security operations"" "New Paper: "Future of the SOC: SOC People — Skills, Not Tiers"" "New Paper: "Autonomic Security Operations — 10X Transformation of the Security Operations Center"" "A SOC Tried To Detect Threats in the Cloud … You Won't Believe What Happened Next" "Why Your Security Data Lake Project Will FAIL!"
S1 Ep 57EP57 Stop Zero Days, Save the World: Project Zero's Maddie Stone Speaks
Guest: Maddie Stone, Security Researcher @ Google Topics: How do we judge the real risk of being attacked using an exploit for a zero day vulnerability? Does the zero day risk vary by company, industry, etc? What does pricing for zero days tell us, if anything? Are prices more driven by supply or demand these days? What security controls or defenses are useful against zero days including against chained zero days? Where are the cloud zero days? We get lots of attention on iOS and Android, what about the cloud platforms? So, how do we solve the paradox of zero days, are they more scary than risky or more risky than scary? Or both? Resources: Project Zero blog A walk through Project Zero metrics Threat Analysis Group (TAG) blog
S1 Ep 56EP56 Rebuilding vs Forklifting and How to Secure a Data Warehouse in the Cloud
Guest: Erlander Lo, Security and Compliance Specialist @ Google Cloud Topics: Imagine you are planning a data warehouse in the cloud, how do you think about security? What are the expected threats to a large data store in the cloud? How to create your security approach for a data warehouse project? Are there regulations that force your decisions about security controls or approaches, no matter what the threats are? How do you approach data governance for this project? What controls are there to implement in Google Cloud for a secure data warehouse effort? Resources: Secure Data Warehouse blueprint (other blueprints) Creativity Inc book "Data Governance: The Definitive Guide" book
S1 Ep 55EP55 The Magic of Cloud Migration: Learn Security Lessons from the Field
Guests: Brandie Anderson, Global Security Practice Lead @ Google Cloud Renzo Cuadros, Regional Security Practice Lead @ Google Cloud Topics: What are your Cloud migration security lessons? Greatest hits? Near misses? What are the most common cloud security mistakes you see? Any practices or tricks to avoid or mitigate them? How do you talk people out of security "lift and shift"? Do clients understand how threat models change when they migrate to the cloud? How clients typically handle compliance in the cloud? What regulations are the most challenging in the cloud? What is the future for cloud migration security? Do we foresee a future when most data is created in the cloud and there is no need to migrate anything? Resources: "Building Secure & Reliable Systems" book Google Cloud Architecture Framework "Threat Models and Cloud Security" (ep12) Modernizing compliance: Introducing Risk and Compliance as Code
S1 Ep 54EP54 Container Security: The Past or The Future?
Guest: Anna Belak, Director of Thought Leadership @ Sysdig Topics: One model for container security is "Infrastructure security | build security | runtime security" - which is most important to get right? Which is hardest to get right? How are you helping users get their infrastructure security right, and what do they get wrong most often here? Your report states that "3⁄4 of running containers have at least one "high" or "critical" vulnerability" and it sounds like pre-cloud IT, but this is about containers? This was very true before cloud, why is this still true in cloud native? Aren't containers easy to "patch" and redeploy? You say "Whether the container images originate from private or public registries, it is critical to scan them and identify known vulnerabilities prior to deploying into production." but then 75% have critical vulns? Is the problem that 75% of containers go unscanned, or that users just don't fix things? "52% of all images are scanned in runtime, and 42% are initially scanned in the CI/CD pipeline." - isn't pipeline and repo scanning easier and cheaper? Why isn't this 90/10 but 40/50? "62% detect shells in containers" sounds (to Anton) that "62% zoos have a dragon in them" i.e. kinda surreal. What's the real story? Containers are at the forefront of cloud native computing yet your report seems to show a lot of pre-cloud practices? Are containers just VMs and VMs just servers? Resources: Sysdig report Kubernetes podcast episode with Anna Belak EP15 Scaling Google Kubernetes Engine Security Sysdig learning hub
S1 Ep 53EP53 Seven Years of SOAR: What's Next?
Guest: Amos Stern, CEO of SIEMplify, now part of Google Cloud Topics: SOAR is in the news again, so what can we say about the state of SOAR in 2022? What have we learned trying to get SOAR adopted 2015-2022 (that's 7 years of SOAR-ing for you)? What are the top playbooks to start your SOC automation using SOAR? What about the links between SOAR as security automation and general IT automation? Does the level of consolidation in this market mean that SOAR really is a feature of SIEMs and not a product in its own right? Resources: Siemplify blog Google Cloud Security Talks Q1 2022
S1 Ep 52EP52 Securing AI with DeepMind CISO
Guest: Vijay Bolina, CISO at DeepMind Topics: We spend a lot of time on Artificial Intelligence (AI) safety, but what about security? What are some of the useful frameworks for thinking about AI security? What is different about securing AI vs securing another data-intensive, complex, enterprise application? What do we know about threat modeling for AI applications? What attacks against AI systems do we expect to see first in real life? What issues with AI security should we expect to face in 3-5 years? Resources: DeepMind Learning Resources DEFCON AI Village and videos CAMLIS
S1 Ep 51EP51 Policy Intelligence: More Fun and Useful than it Sounds!
Guest: Vandy Ramadurai, Product Manager at Google Cloud Topics: What is Cloud Organization Policy, and how is it different from IaC and Policy as code (PaC)? What does successful organization policy design look like from a business and human standpoint? From a technical standpoint? Granular policy work is always hard. How is Google helping users get org policy right? What are the uniquely Google strengths here? Is the AI involved real or is this marketing pixie dust AI? How do users know if something should be a proactive control like a guardrail or if something should be a reactive control like a detection? Resources: Policy Intelligence tools NEXT'21 SEC 203 - Governance guardrails Least privilege for Cloud Functions using Cloud IAM
S1 Ep 50EP50 The Epic Battle: Machine Learning vs Millions of Malicious Documents
Guest: Elie Bursztein, security, anti-abuse and privacy researcher @ Google Topics: This episode draws on a talk available in the podcast materials. Could you summarize the gist of your talk for the audience? What makes the malicious document problem a good candidate for machine learning (ML)? Could you have used rules? "Millions of documents in milliseconds," not sure how to even parse it - what is involved in making it work? Can you explain to the listeners the motivation for reanalyzing old samples, what ground truth means in ML/detection engineering, and how you are using this technique? How fast do the attackers evolve and does this throw ML logic off? Do our efforts at cat-and-mouse with attackers make the mice harder for other people to catch? Does massive-scale ML detections accelerate the attacker's evolution? Resources: The RSA talk "Malicious Documents Emerging Trends: A Gmail Perspective" "EP40 2021: Phishing is Solved?" episode Elie's talks on his site
S1 Ep 49EP49 Lifesaving Tradeoffs: CISO Considerations in moving Healthcare to Cloud
Guest: Taylor Lehmann, Director at the Office of the CISO @ Google Cloud, member of Cybersecurity Action Team Topics: What's top of mind for healthcare organizations' CISOs now? What common advice do you find yourself giving most often to security leaders in healthcare? Is there a list of top 3 items or is this all "it depends"? What regulations are shaping the healthcare industry and its adoption of new technology? HIPAA is from 1996, how does it work for the cloud in the 2020s? Why do you think we aren't seeing more cloud ransomware? Healthcare orgs are sometimes seen as "IT laggards", what are the key security lessons from their cloud migrations? How do we convince some of these organizations that cloud is more secure as long as they use it securely?
S1 Ep 48EP48 Confidentially Speaking 2: Cloudful of Secrets
Guest: Nelly Porter, Group Product Manager @ Google Cloud Topics In the past year, what has changed with Confidential Computing here at Google? Could we please talk about a user or two who has really nailed it with our Confidential Computing? What have we learned about the threat models of clients who are choosing to deploy Confidential Computing? What are they solving for? Doing Confidential Computing "right" feels like a lot more than having some fancy CPUs with magic math. What challenges do customers face adopting it? We finally "married" Confidential Computing with EKM. What types of clients are deploying this new technology? What threats are they mitigating? What's on the horizon for Confidential Computing? Resources: "Trust Google Cloud more with ubiquitous data encryption" The Confidential Computing Consortium whitepapers Confidential Computing at Google EP12 Threat Models and Cloud Security
S1 Ep 47EP47 Megatrends, Macro-changes, Microservices, Oh My! Changes in 2022 and Beyond in Cloud Security
Guest: Phil Venables (@philvenables), Vice President, Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) @ Google Cloud Topics: Explain the whole cloud security megatrend concept to us? How can we better explain that "yes, cloud is more secure than most client's data centers"? Can you please explain "shared fate" one more time? Shared fate seems to require shared incentives. Do we see the incentives to invest in security changing within organizations migrating to Cloud? Cloud as the Digital Immune System sounds really cool, what does it mean for a typical practitioner - security and developers both? What about the risk aggregation (eggs in one basket) argument against relying on CSP for all security? Does software sovereignty mean that Cloud providers are always going to be held to common standards and lose out on the opportunity to sell highly differentiated software on top? Resources: IT Leaders: Pay Attention To These 8 Security Megatrends In 2022 Megatrends drive cloud adoption—and improve security for all
S1 Ep 46EP46 Products and Solutions: Helping Our Customers Precipitate Change
Guests: Alison Reyes, Director, Security Solutions, Google Cloud Iman Ghanizada, Solutions Manager for Security Operations & Analytics @ Google Cloud Topics: What is our thinking on solutions vs products for security? Sure, "security is a process, not a product," but where do solutions fit in? Security as an industry has too many vendors with little understanding of how users secure things, can solutions approach fix that? Google is sometimes known for writing code and just throwing it out there, do solutions change that dynamic for Google Cloud clients who come to us for security? Who are the target users for our security solutions? Why did we choose those solutions and not others? To me, solutions is how our products actually live in the real world. But can we really hope to transform customer operations with solutions? One of the solutions dear to my heart is Autonomic Security Operations that seeks to "10X the SOC", how was the experience so far? Is 10X real and what does it mean? How do we know if we succeeded, what are metrics for solutions? How do solutions fit with Google Cybersecurity Action Team launch? Do we need more action figures now? Resources: Google Cybersecurity Action Team NEXT Special - Google Cybersecurity Action Team: What's the Story? Google SRE books Autonomic Security Operations Web App and API Protection Achieving Autonomic Security Operations: Reducing toil Autonomic Security Operations: 10X Transformation of the Security Operations Center
S1 Ep 45EP45 VirusTotal Insights on Ransomware Business and Technology
Guests: Vlad Stolyarov, Security Engineer @ Threat Analysis Group (TAG) Vicente Diaz, Threat Intelligence Strategist @ VirusTotal Topics: Why GandCrab / REvil was the most popular ransomware family in 2020? What is ransomware as a service? Is every scary article about ransomware essentially marketing for the criminals? Some ransomware payoffs are huge, how do you think they spend the money? How else do they profit off stolen data apart from double extortion schemes? Are there triple extortion schemes? What is the concept of a "trusted brand in ransomware", is it better for clients because they will return the data? Why did non-Windows ransomware fail as a business? Do we expect 0day exploits to become more popular in ransomware? Based on this research, what is the key reason for ransomware's wild success? Resources: "Ransomware in a Global Context" report "Malware Hunting with VirusTotal" (ep30) Google TAG blog NoMoreRansom Org "Cybereason: 80% of orgs that paid the ransom were hit again" Google Cybersecurity Action Team Threat Horizons Report (full, brief)