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In this episode, former CISOs-turned-founders Jerry Perullo, Mario Duarte, and Sounil Yu discuss the recent wave of cyber-attacks using Snowflake and the model of shared fate. They debate the effectiveness of banning ransom payments and explore the complexities of cybersecurity regulation, using recent events involving UnitedHealth and Jerry's former employer as case studies. The conversation also touches on the ethical dilemmas CISOs face when interacting with venture capital, highlighting pers

The notion of "Risk Acceptance" has always challenged me. For the uninitiated, Risk Acceptance is a concept often discussed in cybersecurity leadership when it comes to accountability for cyber debt. The idea is that cybersecurity leaders and other professionals identify risks and recommend mitigating actions that would reduce that risk, but recognize that it is always up to business leadership to weigh the costs and benefits of change and make a final decision. Risk Acceptance has always come u

Episode 3: Incidents In Episode 1 of this series I talked about oversight of cybersecurity threats and how a Board can engage with senior management to determine the mission of the cybersecurity department and prioritize testing and analysis. Next I moved on to cyber risks in Episode 2 and the idea of a Remediation Agility chart to guide a wide-ranging Board room discussion with a single visual. The next area that deserves a permanent spot on the Board agenda is incidents. Incident awareness a

We've all run to the same side of the boat on supply chain security when it comes to cyber. Rather than chasing the Sisyphean (and antithetical to modern product-development philosophy) task of ensuring our suppliers deliver perfectly secure software, we should be expected to architect and deploy our dependencies with the assumption they will be compromised at some point, minimizing the amount of impact that could have and ensuring we could detect such an issue timely. To expound on it, I'll sa

Years ago I found myself in one of those awkward elevator pairings where you are unexpectedly face to face with your CEO. It's a particularly awkward spot when you are a CISO, as beyond the usual desperation to sound brilliant that most execs feel in that spot, the CEO these days also feels pressure to demonstrate "tone at the top", "executive buy-in", and "stakeholder oversight" when given the chance. In that particular vignette I doubled down on the awkwardness, as his quick cordial cyber com

There is a lot of confusion about network ingress and egress. This isn't limited to junior staff; I've witnessed this many times among software engineers and technology leaders alike. Often only network and firewall engineers really comprehend the topic fully, though this should not be the case. A network connection must begin with an "initiator". This is usually thought of as a "client" in a traditional "client server" model. The client is defined not by their intention, purpose, or operating

As originally published on Vectra's Unfiltered at https://www.unfilteredcxo.com/ Cybersecurity is afflicted with the duty of “proving a negative” all the way up to the Board room. We can learn some tricks from incident response and threat intelligence to tackle the art of distinguishing the lucky from the good. When it comes to incident response, it is challenging – but essential – to define criteria for closing an investigation. Enter the true positive. When someone says that they did not see

There is a misconception out there that security departments should be ingesting feeds of Indicators of Compromise (IOCs) and loading them into firewalls, endpoint software, and proxy configurations as soon as possible. This perception is amplified by product marketing focused on the task, and it's easy to get caught up in the idea that this is our mission. By the time an IOC has been published in an intelligence report, there is a high likelihood it has been neutralized. Imagine a command & co

Patching became a household term during the Equifax security breach and Congressional hearings. While IT maintenance and hygiene have their place in running a secure environment, over-emphasis can distract limited resources from more important tasks or trigger operational risks. Patches are only relevant when a security vulnerability is known and addressed by a vendor. So whether it is a 0-day vulnerability discovery without a patch yet available or just the unavoidable window between the time

Multifactor authentication (MFA / 2FA) is arguably the most powerful security control deployed over the past 20 years. But it dawned on me that it isn't multi that's really getting it done. It's the fact that one of those factors has been a one-time-password (OTP or 1TP) in a token or app that changes every 60 seconds. The unwritten math about MFA is that a single factor is difficult to compromise, and thus two of them = difficult^2. But in reality our static credentials have become easy thanks

I listened to an NPR story on SMS SIM swapping on my drive in this morning. This is a pretty well-documented threat vector whereby adversaries port your phone number over to their device at a key moment in an authentication hack so they can intercept a one-time verification code and impersonate you. The way it usually plays out, the intercepted code plays a part in "recovering" a "lost" password for your email account, which they then use to "recover" more passwords for more important accounts,