Enterprise Security Weekly (audio)

2025 brings us close to an interesting milestone - ransomware attacks, in their current, enterprise-focused form, are almost a decade old. These attacks are so common today, it's impossible to report on all of them. There are signs of hope, however - ransomware payments are significantly down. There are also signs defenders are getting more resilient, and are recovering more quickly from these attacks. Today, with Intel471's Mike Mitchell, we'll discuss what defenders need to know to protect against today's ransomware attacks. He'll share some stories and anecdotes from his experiences with customers. He'll also share some tips, and tricks for successful hunts, and how to catch attacks before even your tools trigger alerts. Segment Resources: https://intel471.com/blog/how-ransomware-may-trend-in-2025 And now, for something completely different! I've always urged the importance for practitioners to understand the underlying technology that they're challenged with defending. When we're yelling at the Linux ad

In 2011, Marc Andreessen predicted that software would eat the world. Specifically, the prediction was that software companies would take over the economy and disrupt all industries. The economic prediction has mostly come true, with 9 out of 10 of the most highly valued companies being tech companies. The industry disruption didn't materialize in some cases, and outright failed in others. Healthcare seems to be one of these 'disruption-resistant' areas. Ed joins us today to discuss why that might be, and what the paths towards securing the healthcare industry might look like. Segment Resources: Ed's podcast, Risk Never Sleeps We get a visit from Tanya Janca to discuss her latest book, Alice and Bob Learn Secure Coding! Segment Resources: Tanya's latest book on Amazon Tanya's previous book, Alice and Bob Learn Application Security on Amazon Tanya's website, She Hacks Purple This week, in the enterprise security news, we’ve got some funding and acquisitions! ransomware payments are DOWN 35% infostealers o

In this interview, we're excited to have Ilona Cohen to help us understand what changes this new US administration might bring, in terms of cybersecurity regulation. Ilona's insights come partially from her own experiences working from within the White House. Before she was the Chief Legal Officer of HackerOne, she was a senior lawyer to President Obama and served as General Counsel of the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB). In this hyper-partisan environment, it's easy to get hung up on particular events. Do many of us lack cross-administration historical perspective? Probably. Should we be outraged by the disillusion of the CSRB, or was this a fairly ordinary occurrence when a new administration comes in? These are the kinds of questions I'll be posing to Ilona in this conversation. How the Change Healthcare breach can prompt real cybersecurity change 'Shift Left' feels like a cliché at this point, but it's often difficult to track tech and security movements if you aren't interacting with

We've got a few compelling topics to discuss within SecOps today. First, Tim insists it's possible to automate a large amount of SecOps work, without the use of generative AI. Not only that, but he intends to back it up by tracking the quality of this automated work with an ISO standard unknown to cybersecurity. I've often found useful lessons and wisdom outside security, so I get excited when someone borrows from another, more mature industry to help solve problems in cyber. In this case, we'll be talking about Acceptable Quality Limits (AQL), an ISO standard quality assurance framework that's never been used in cyber. Segment Resources: Introducing AQL for cyber. AQL - How we do it An AQL 'calculator' you can play around with We couldn't decide what to talk to Allie about, so we're going with a bit of everything. Don't worry - it's all related and ties together nicely. First, we'll discuss AI and automation in the SOC - Allie is covering this trend closely, and we want to know if she's seeing any results

Spoiler: it's probably in your pocket or sitting on the table in front of you, right now! Modern smartphones are conveniently well-suited for identity verification. They have microphones, cameras, depth sensors, and fingerprint readers in some cases. With face scanning quickly becoming the de facto technology used for identity verification, it was a no-brainer for Nametag to build a solution around mobile devices to address employment scams. Segment Resources: Company website Aaron's book, Loyal Listeners of the show are probably aware (possibly painfully aware) that I spend a lot of time analyzing breaches to understand how failures occurred. Every breach story contains lessons organizations can learn from to avoid suffering the same fate. A few details make today's breach story particularly interesting: It was a Chinese APT Maybe the B or C team? They seemed to be having a hard time Their target was a blind spot for both the defender AND the attacker Segment Resources: https://www.binarydefense.com/r

Celebrating and Elevating Women in Cyber: Recently, International Women in Cyber Day (September 1) highlighted the ongoing challenges women face in the cybersecurity field, as well as the progress made in recent years. Women bring exceptional skills and knowledge to cybersecurity; however, it is estimated that they make up only 20% to 25% of the cybersecurity workforce—a percentage that has remained stagnant for years. Even more concerning, women often hit a glass ceiling just six to ten years into their cybersecurity careers. Lynn Dohm sheds light on these issues and emphasizes what the industry needs to focus on to continue celebrating and elevating women in cyber. Segment Resources: 2023 State of Inclusion Benchmark in Cybersecurity 2024 Cyber Talent Study by N2K and WiCyS WiCyS Programs This week, we've added an extra news segment just on AI. Not because we wanted to, but because the news cycle has bludgeoned us into it. My mom is asking about Chinese AI, my neighbor wants to know why his stocks tanked

HackerOne's co-founder, Michiel Prins walks us through the latest new offensive security service: AI red teaming. At the same time enterprises are globally trying to figure out how to QA and red team generative AI models like LLMs, early adopters are challenged to scale these tests. Crowdsourced bug bounty platforms are a natural place to turn for assistance with scaling this work, though, as we'll discuss on this episode, it is unlike anything bug hunters have ever tackled before. Segment Resources: https://www.hackerone.com/ai/snap-ai-red-teaming https://www.hackerone.com/thought-leadership/ai-safety-red-teaming This interview is a bit different from our norm. We talk to the founder and CEO of OpenVPN about what it is like to operate a business based on open source, particularly through trying times like the recent pandemic. How do you compete when your competitors are free to build products using your software and IP? It seems like an oxymoron, but an open source-based business actually has some signifi

Today's data landscape is undergoing a seismic shift with increasing regulatory pressures, rapid acceleration to the cloud, and AI adoption. Join BigID's CEO and Co-Founder, Dimitri Sirota, to learn how organizations can adopt a holistic approach to their data security and compliance strategy to keep up with the revolution in data, transforming their data into a competitive advantage. This segment is sponsored by BigID! Start protecting your sensitive data wherever your data lives at https://securityweekly.com/bigid. I've been so excited to see the external attack surface management (EASM) market take off in the past few years. This market category focuses exclusively on security issues exposed to the public Internet - issues ANYONE can see. All organizations have exposure management problems, but industries that are traditionally underfunded when it comes to cybersecurity and IT are particularly worse off. We see breaches in these industries every day - industries like manufacturing, healthcare, and educatio

We're thrilled to have Frank Duff on to discuss threat-informed defense. As one of the MITRE folks that helped create MITRE ATT&CK and ATT&CK evaluations, Frank has been working on how best to define and communicate attack language for many years now. The company he founded, Tidal Cyber is in a unique position to both leverage what MITRE has built with ATT&CK and help enterprises operationalize it. Segment Resources: Tidal Cyber website Tidal Cyber Community Edition We're a fan of hacker lore and history here at Security Weekly. In fact, Paul's Security Weekly has interviewed some of the most notable (and notorious) personalities from both the business side of the industry and the hacker community. We're very excited to share this new effort to document hacker history through in-person interviews. The series is called "Where Warlocks Stay Up Late", and is the creation of Nathan Sportsman and other folks at Praetorian. The timing is crucial, as a lot of the original hackers and tech innovators ar

Since D3FEND was founded to fill a gap created by the MITRE ATT&CK Matrix, it has come a long way. We discuss the details of the 1.0 release of D3FEND with Peter in this episode, along with some of the new tools they've built to go along with this milestone. To use MITRE's own words to describe the gap this project fills: "it is necessary that practitioners know not only what threats a capability claims to address, but specifically how those threats are addressed from an engineering perspective, and under what circumstances the solution would work" Segment Resources: https://d3fend.mitre.org In the enterprise security news, a final few fundings before the year closes out Arctic Wolf buys Cylance from Blackberry for cheap, a sentence that feels very weird to say the quiet HTTPS revolution passkeys are REALLY catching on resilience keeps showing up in the titles of news items Apple Intelligence insults the BBC’s intelligence MITRE ATT&CK evals drama Lastpass breach drama continues All that and more,

For our second year now, Mike Privette, from Return on Security and the Security, Funded newsletter joins us to discuss the year's highlights and what's to come in the next 12 months. In some ways, it has been a return to form for funding, though some casualties of a tough market likely had to seek acquisition when they might have otherwise raised another round and stayed independent a while longer. We'll cover some stats, talk 2025 IPO market, and discuss the likelihood of (already) being in another bubble, particularly with regards to the already saturated AI security market. It won't be all financial trends though, we'll discuss some of the technical market trends, whether they're finding market fit, and how ~50ish AI SOC startups could possibly survive in such a crowded space. In this segment, we discuss two new FIDO Alliance standards focused on credential portability. Specifically, if passwordless is going to catch on, we need to minimize friction and maximize usability. In practice, this means that pas

In this final installment of a trio of discussions with Theresa Lanowitz about Cyber Resilience, we put it all together and attempt to figure out what the road to cyber resilience looks like, and what barriers security leaders will have to tackle along the way. We'll discuss: How to identify these barriers to cyber resilience Be secure by design Align cybersecurity investments with the business Also, be sure to check out the first two installments of this series! Episode 380: Cybersecurity Success is Business Success Episode 383: Cybersecurity Budgets: The Journey from Reactive to Proactive This segment is sponsored by LevelBlue. Visit https://securityweekly.com/levelblue to learn more about them! When focused on cybersecurity through a vulnerability management lens, it's tempting to see the problem as a race between exploit development and patching speed. This is a false narrative, however. While there are hundreds of thousands of vulnerabilities, each requiring unique exploits, the number of post-expl

Check out this episode from the ESW Vault, hand picked by main host Adrian Sanabria! This segment was originally published on December 22, 2023. We're excited to give an end-of-year readout on the performance of the cybersecurity industry with Mike Privette, founder of Return on Security and author of the weekly Security, Funded newsletter. This year, this podcast has leaned heavily on the Security, Funded newsletter to prep for our news segment, as it provides a great summary of all the funding and M&A events going on each week. In this segment, we look back at 2023, statistics for the year, comparisons to 2022, interesting insights, predictions, and more! Segment Resources: Mike's blog; Return on Security: https://www.returnonsecurity.com/ Mike's newsletter; Security, Funded: https://www.returnonsecurity.com/subscribe Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/vault-esw-17

This is a topic our hosts are very passionate about, and we're excited to discuss with Mariana Padilla, co-founder and CEO of Hackerverse. She wants to change how cybersecurity sales works, with a focus on making the process more transparent and ideally demonstrating a product's efficacy before buyers even need to talk to a sales team. We'll discuss why existing sales processes are broken, how VC funding impacts vendor sales/marketing, and why community-led growth is so important. Why a special segment on Microsoft Ignite announcements? There were a lot of announcements Microsoft is the largest security vendor, in terms of revenue Microsoft and its products are also the biggest and most vulnerable hacking target in the tech industry. In the enterprise security news, Bitsight, Snyk, and Silverfort announce acquisitions Tanium announces an “autonomous” endpoint security offering We find out how much a smartphone costs when it is manufactured in the US CISA’s leadership announces resignations Ransomware is go

There have been a lot of bold claims about how generative AI and machine learning will transform the SOC. Ironically, the SOC was (arguably) invented only because security products failed to make good on bold claims. The cybersecurity market is full of products that exist only to solve the problems created by other security products (Security Analytics, SOC Automation, Risk-Based Vulnerability Management). Other products are natural evolutions and pick up where others leave off. In this interview, we'll explore what AI can and can't do, particularly when it comes to alert triage and other common SOC tasks. Segment Resources: From Forrester: Generative AI Will Not Fulfill Your Autonomous SOC Hopes (Or Even Your Demo Dreams) From Intezer: Mastering SOC Automation in 2024: Tips, Trends and Tools The Future of SOC Automation Platforms SentinelOne wants to make the autonomous SOC a reality Naturally, the next approach to try is a federated one. How do we break down cybersecurity into more bite-sized componen

CISOs struggle more with reactive budgets than CIOs or CTOs. It's not that part of the CISO's budget shouldn't be reactive, it's certainly necessary to an extent. The problem is when proactive measures suffer as a result. In this interview, we'll discuss some of the causes behind this and some strategies for breaking out of this loop. This segment is sponsored by LevelBlue. Visit https://securityweekly.com/levelblue to learn more about them! Is it a product or a feature? Is it DLP 4.0, or something legitimately new? Buy now, or wait for further consolidation? There are SO many questions about this market. It's undeniably important - data hygiene and governance continues to be a frustrating mess in many organizations, but is this the solution? We'll discuss with Todd to find out. In the enterprise security news, Some big fundings no less than 4 acquisitions Silencing the EDR silencers ghost jobs overinflated estimates on open cybersecurity jobs weaponizing Microsoft Copilot fun projects with disposable vapes

The future is here! Imagine if you could get into the office, a datacenter, or even an apartment building as easily as you unlock your smartphone. Alcatraz AI is doing exactly that with technology that works similarly to how smartphones unlock using your face. It works in the dark, if you shave off your beard, and so quickly you don't even need to slow down for the scan - you can just keep on walking. We don't often cover physical security, so this interview is going to be a treat for us. There are SO many questions to ask here, particularly for our hosts who have done physical penetration tests, social engineering, and tailgating in the past to get past physical security measures. This week, in the enterprise security news: the latest cybersecurity fundings Cyera acquires Trail Security Sophos acquires Secureworks new companies and products more coverage on Cyberstarts’ sunrise program AI can control your PC public cybersecurity companies are going private Splunk and Palo Alto beef All that and more, on th

Ever heard someone say, "the attacker only has to be right once, but the defender has to get it right every time"? On this episode, we'll dispel that myth. There is some truth to the saying, but only with regards to initial access to the target's environment. Once on the inside, the attacker's advantage flips to the defender. Call it the 'Home Alone' effect. Or the Goonies effect? Die Hard? So many movie metaphors work here! The conversation isn't just about setting traps for attackers, however, there's also a conversation to have about fundamentals and ensuring practitioners are prepared for whatever attackers might throw at them. This segment is inspired by the essay from Lenny by the same name: Transform the Defender’s Dilemma into the Defender’s Advantage The vast majority of the folks working polls and elections are volunteers. This creates a significant training challenge. Not only do they have to learn how to perform a complex and potentially stressful job in a short amount of time (most training is on

Secure by design is more than just AppSec - it addresses how the whole business designs systems and processes to be effective and resilient. The latest report from LevelBlue on Cyber Resilience reveals security programs that are reactive, ill-equipped, and disconnected from IT and business leaders. Most security problems are out of security teams' hands. Addressing them requires input, buy-in, and action from business leaders and IT. Security cannot afford to be separate from the rest of the organization. In this interview, we'll discuss how we could potentially solve some of these issues with Theresa Lanowitz from LevelBlue. Segment Resources: Grab your copy of the LevelBlue Futures Report on Cyber Resilience This segment is sponsored by LevelBlue. Visit https://securityweekly.com/levelblue to learn more about them! Implementing SASE can be tricky and onerous, but it doesn't have to be. Today, we discuss Unified SASE as a Service with Renuka Nadkarni, Chief Product Officer at Aryaka. Particularly, how can

For this interview, Ben from CyberNest joins us to talk about one of my favorite subjects: information sharing in infosec. There are so many amazing skills, tips, techniques, and intel that security professionals have to share. Sadly, a natural corporate reluctance to share information viewed as privileged and private has historically had a chilling effect on information sharing. We'll discuss how to build such a community, how to clear the historical hurdles with information sharing, and how to monetize it without introducing bias and compromising the integrity of the information shared. Aaron was already a skilled bug hunter and working at HackerOne as a triage analyst at the time. What he discovered can't even be described as a software bug or a vulnerability. This type of finding has probably resulted in more security incidents and breaches than any other category: the unintentional misconfiguration. There's a lot of conversation right now about the grey space around 'shared responsibility'. In our news s