After 5 seasons, it’s curtain call for Security Voices. In this final episode, Jack and I reflect on half a decade of podcasting together through times that were both extraordinary for the world and for each of us personally. We discuss some of our favorite moments, most memorable guests, and the lessons learned from roughly 60 episodes of exploring the unique personalities and stories of cybersecurity. At around 40 minutes, our last pod is more short and sweet than long, tearful farewell. The S...
Jan 16, 2024•42 min•Season 5Ep. 60
The ascendancy of India in Silicon Valley is undeniable. From top executives such as Satya Nadella (Microsoft) and Nikesh Arora (Palo Alto Networks) to leading investors, we’ve become well accustomed to working with and often for people who have immigrated from India. Given the wave of immigration from India started decades ago, our Indian coworkers, investors and leaders are such an established part of the tech industry that we often give little thought to the cultural differences that underlie...
Nov 27, 2023•1 hr
The classic mindset of cyber security unmistakably originates from its early leaders: financial services, the defense industrial complex, and big companies that had too much to lose from ignoring what was called at the time “information security risk”. They tried to calculate largely unknowable risks to explain digital concepts to analog executives. They leaned on medieval metaphors such as castles and moats to make formerly arcane technology like firewalls understandable to people who just got ...
Oct 03, 2023•1 hr 3 min•Season 5Ep. 59
Let’s say it’s 2012. And you're graduating Stanford with a comp sci degree. You could go to Google, Facebook or any of a number of well-paying emerging juggernauts. If you’re Frank Wang, you move across the coast and do your PhD in cybersecurity at MIT. Now you’re doing your PhD. And you make pals with a local VC. So naturally, you start a cybersecurity incubator as an academic (Cybersecurity Factory) which churns out companies such as Huntress Labs. Your PhD is in the bag now and you're ready t...
Aug 28, 2023•59 min
This past weekend, the New York Times posted an article explaining the United States is scrambling to clean government systems from a deep, pervasive infiltration of the country’s infrastructure by the Chinese. Much like the Russian attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure, the intent appears to be to disrupt any U.S. action that would be a response to Chinese military action in Taiwan. The role of nation state actors in driving the threat landscape has brought us to a place where the lines between p...
Jul 31, 2023•1 hr 6 min•Season 4Ep. 57
"Any country that intervenes in Taiwan will face serious consequences, including cyber attacks." This statement in January by the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs made clear that the United States must be ready to defend itself in what many assume to be an inevitable conflict over Taiwan’s independence. It begs the question, how will we defend ourselves from such a powerful adversary with one of the best cyber armies in the world? At the heart of the answer is the United States infrastructure...
Jun 20, 2023•1 hr 15 min•Season 4Ep. 56
The breakaway success of ChatGPT is hiding an important fact and an even bigger problem. The next wave of generative AI will not be built by trawling the Internet but by mining hordes of proprietary data that have been piling up for years inside organizations. While Elon Musk and Reddit may breathe a sigh of relief, this ushers in a new set of concerns that go well beyond prompt injections and AI hallucinations. Who is responsible for making sure our private data doesn’t get used as training dat...
May 06, 2023•1 hr 4 min
Hidden bunkers, stacks of canned food and piles of artillery. Disaster preparedness has become an Internet meme and these are some of the “prepper” community’s showcase images. But most of us who have lived through the recent pandemic, the Capital insurrection on January 6th and more no longer take the threat of a major disaster lightly. For those of us not willing or able to dig out a backyard bunker, is there a rational middleground where we can feel well-prepared for whatever comes next? Soft...
Mar 26, 2023•1 hr 7 min
Continuing from our dialogue with Tomas Maldonado who has the unique job of securing the NFL, we have a conversation with Allen Ohanian whose day job is to protect the Los Angeles Department of Child and Family Services (DCFS). LA DCFS is the largest agency of its type in the United States, its central focus is its 10,000 social workers who help defend some of the most vulnerable people in Southern California. Allen’s role as CISO of the DCFS is to make sure that both the social workers– and all...
Feb 06, 2023•52 min
After 2 decades of trying to make SIEMs work, security data lakes are a hot topic as they present an increasingly attractive alternative. The only hotter topic is ChatGPT and the game changing potential of AI. So in episode 52 of Security Voices, we mash the two together as Dave, Pathik Patel (Informatica), and Omer Singer (Snowflake) explore the many angles of security data lakes with an AI-assist from ChatGPT. From a functional definition to dishing on whether security data lakes signal the de...
Jan 05, 2023•1 hr 11 min
The winds of change are always blowing in cybersecurity, but there’s moments when they reach a gale force, When the landscape is reshaped dramatically by an event that hits us like a hurricane, changing how we feel about our jobs, our industry, and perhaps even shaking our resolve to continue on in the same career path. When Joe Sullivan, former head of security for Uber, was found guilty of concealing a breach in early October the effect was immediate. No matter how you felt about Joe or the co...
Nov 07, 2022•1 hr 24 min
In cybersecurity, we have teams focused on managing vulnerabilities. We have SOCs who spend their days obsessing over threats. App sec teams. Data privacy teams. In the typical, modern cybersecurity team, we have exactly zero people focused on helping humans defend themselves and the organization in spite of a massive increase in scams and fraud that are squarely aimed at tricking people into making bad decisions. Are we really more at risk from a new foreign adversary or CVSS 9 vulnerability th...
Oct 25, 2022•50 min
Imagine you’re walking past the sports book in Las Vegas. People are betting on baseball, horses, and the usual fare. Something catches your eye, you look more closely and you can’t believe your eyes. People are betting on whether or not you're going to fail at doing your job this week! While this may sound far-fetched, this exact scenario played out for Tomas Maldonado, the then freshly minted CISO of the National Football League when the 2020 NFL Draft shifted to a virtual format unexpectedly ...
Jul 22, 2022•1 hr 3 min
First, a confession: this is the last episode we would have envisioned when we started Security Voices. Compliance was as mundane as it is mandatory– where’s the fun in that? Where’s the untold, fascinating story of the person who summited the tallest mountain? Rose from ashes to improbable success? In the short years that have passed since we started in early 2019, the world has changed dramatically. And so has compliance. From driving cyberinsurance premiums to becoming the security baseline f...
Jun 16, 2022•1 hr 8 min
For the second episode in a row, we’ve caught a seasoned entrepreneur at that perfect moment when they’ve started a new company but still have time for a conversation before their new adventure kicks into high gear. Oliver Friedrichs, founder of several security companies including Immunenet and Phantom, joins us to talk product strategy as he embarks on a new journey to disrupt the security industry once again with his new venture Pangea. The most critical, first question for any young company ...
Apr 26, 2022•1 hr 13 min
2+ years to interview Alfred Huger wasn’t too long to wait. After spending 8 years at Cisco following the acquisition of SourceFire, Al recently departed the networking giant to do his 4th startup in as many decades. Unbound from the usual PR police, Al candidly speaks on a wide range of topics from why he has stayed at companies long past acquisition and how to distinguish between a miserable and a winning acquirer. Having raised venture capital funding in the 90s until now, Al’s experience cha...
Mar 15, 2022•1 hr 17 min
There are few people, if any, who have given more of themselves to the cybersecurity community than Lesley Carhart. Our conversation with Lesley came immediately after the 3rd annual PancakesCon, a free conference she conceived with a unique “20 on, 20 off” format that celebrates who we are outside of work as much as what we accomplish as security professionals. In the fashion of a person who is both an incident response expert and a community organizer, the conference was pulled together in a f...
Feb 07, 2022•1 hr 25 min
Your fledgling startup has just been sued by one of the most powerful companies in the world. How do you defend yourself? And keep your company afloat? This was the challenge faced by Amanda Gorton, CEO of Corellium, a company whose virtualization platform enables efficient mobile security research and quality testing across a massive variety of devices. Sued by Apple for both copyright infringement and violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), Amanda was thrust into an exhaustin...
Dec 27, 2021•53 min
What if there was someone who could take all of the best security research over recent months and distill it down into the greatest hits? Sort of like a Spotify “Release Radar”, but for the best talks at conferences. There is. It’s not in Blinkist. It’s (back) at ThinkstScapes after a multiyear hiatus. And it’s now gloriously free. This episode of Security Voices covers the return of Thinkstscapes with Jacob Torrey who led the reboot of the now quarterly report. In the interview with Jack and Da...
Dec 02, 2021•57 min
Hundreds of inexpensive satellites are now regularly launched into space through SpaceX’s Smallsat Rideshare program. Some are sophisticated and commercial, others are DIY and experimental. They share space with now over 3,000 other artificial satellites orbiting the Earth. What could possibly go wrong? Frank Pound joins Jack and Dave for a conversation to answer the question of just how hackproof satellites really are and why it matters, starting with the Hack-a-Sat competition. Hack-a-Sat is a...
Sep 13, 2021•1 hr 11 min
A clear pattern is emerging of security leaders also being anointed with responsibility for privacy. Some of the origins of this movement no doubt can be found in regulations like GDPR who blend requirements for both security and privacy in mandates for data breach response. While this may seem like a logical pairing for lawmakers, it can be anything but a happy marriage inside an organization as they not only compete for resources but also have divergent needs in areas such as data retention. W...
Aug 16, 2021•1 hr 10 min
We’ve conditioned ourselves to look at our technology in a similar way we look at a box of tools: as instruments that passively do what we make them do. When we think of the future of artificial intelligence, it’s tempting to leap to fully autonomous solutions一 when exactly will that Tesla finally drive by itself? In our interview with Jamie Winterton, we explore a future where AI is neither a passive tool or a self-contained machine but rather an active partner. Human/machine teaming, an approa...
Jun 07, 2021•1 hr 2 min
Communications professionals are often quiet coaches. They work their magic behind the scenes. They hold their opinions tightly and express them infrequently. In short, their influence is everywhere but their fingerprints are often invisible. Melanie Ensign is having none of that. And we’re all the better for it. In this 64 minute interview, you’ll have the pleasure of meeting one of the most influential and outspoken communications executives in the world of cybersecurity and privacy. We begin ...
Apr 12, 2021•1 hr 8 min
We’ve met and passed the 1 year anniversary of the COVID-19 pandemic and cases of burnout are off the charts. We’re tired of Zoom. We’re tired of masks. Far too many kids are stuck at home instead of at school. The list could go on but the result is obvious: we’re burned out. The effect can be all the more profound for beleaguered security professionals who often struggle with burn-out even at the best of times. Jack and Dave return in this mini-episode for a quick conversation about how to iden...
Mar 31, 2021•32 min
This episode of Security Voices is different. Let’s say you sat down at the end of a long day and had a casual drink with a few industry friends before dinner. The conversation quickly turns to serious topics which are all discussed with thoughtful insight, biting humor and some well-placed profanity. Welcome to the latest episode of Security Voices where Jack & Dave wander off the beaten path with Abhishek Agrawal and Ryan Noon, co-founders of email protection company Material Security. Thi...
Feb 07, 2021•1 hr 4 min
In our 1st episode of ‘21, we cap off our cloud security series with a recap of the major milestones, key trends and surprises across 2020 through the eyes of cloud expert and podcaster, Justin Brodley. If you think you might have missed a few things that happened in the public cloud last year while waiting for news on COVID-19 vaccines, hitting refresh on election results or wondering when the four horsemen were finally going to show up, this episode is your chance to catch up and look ahead th...
Jan 17, 2021•1 hr 7 min
Investors make their money seeing things others don’t. Making big bets based on both digging into painstaking detail and their ability to forecast what will happen many years into the future. In this 5th and (almost!) final episode of our series on public cloud security, we get deep into the mind of Bucky Moore from Kleiner Perkins to learn how the flow of funding is both responding to and shaping our industry’s transformation from protecting our own data centers to renting them from others. Buc...
Dec 26, 2020•1 hr 10 min
As longstanding cybersecurity companies lumber their way into the public cloud and "born in the cloud" startups fight for attention, cloud observability titan Datadog entered the security market in 2020 with two new products. This is far from the first time a company has used an adjacent market to make the cybersecurity leap. Oftentimes it fails, but Splunk immediately comes to mind as a crossover success. Jack and Dave interview Datadog’s Marc Tremsal in this episode to provide a view into what...
Nov 20, 2020•1 hr 10 min
Our conversation with Rich Mogull was intended to provide an analyst view point on public cloud security. While Rich certainly delivered on this promise, the episode turned into something more important: therapy. If you find yourself wondering if you’re burnt out from cyber security and life in general, this is for you. Our conversation with Rich starts with the work he does in disaster response, focusing on his recent time responding to the COVID-19 pandemic as a paramedic. He explains how key ...
Oct 25, 2020•1 hr 7 min
In our 1st episode of this series, Teri provided an expert’s broad view of what’s happening with security in the public cloud. In this episode, Yelp’s Zach Musgrave does the opposite: we go into the trenches to understand what it takes to protect a fully cloud native business on a daily basis. While Yelp was born in ‘04, 2 years before Amazon launched its first AWS service, it started its cloud native journey in 2013. Their early transition makes the company one of the longest tenured organizati...
Sep 27, 2020•1 hr 4 min
