Guest:

• Phil Venables, Vice President, Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) @ Google Cloud

Topics

• Why is our industry suddenly obsessed with resilience? Is this ransomware’s doing?
• How did the PCAST report come to be?  Can you share the backstory and how it was created?
• The PCAST report emphasizes the importance of leading indicators for security and resilience. How can organizations effectively shift their focus from lagging indicators to these leading indicators?
• The report also emphasizes the importance of "Cyber-Physical Modularity" - this sounds mysterious to us, and probably our listeners! What is it and how does this concept contribute to enhancing the resilience of critical infrastructure?
• The report advocates for regular and rigorous stress testing. How can organizations effectively implement such stress testing to identify vulnerabilities and improve their resilience? 
• In your opinion, what are the most critical takeaways from our PCAST-related paper for organizations looking to improve their security and resilience posture today?
• What are some of the challenges organizations might face when implementing the PCAST recommendations, and how can they overcome these challenges? 
• Do organizations get resilience benefits “for free” by using Google Cloud?

Resources:

• 10 ways to make cyber-physical systems more resilient
• “Cyber-Physical Resilience and the Cloud: Putting the White House PCAST report into practice” report
• Megatrends drive cloud adoption—and improve security for all
• EP163 Cloud Security Megatrends: Myths, Realities, Contentious Debates and Of Course AI
• Advising The President On Cyber-Physical Resilience - Philip Venables (at PSW)
• EP201 Every CTO Should Be a CSTO (Or Else!) - Transformation Lessons from The Hoff
• EP171 GenAI in the Wrong Hands: Unmasking the Threat of Malicious AI and Defending Against the Dark Side

Guest:

• Rich Mogull, SVP of Cloud Security at Firemon and CEO at Securosis

Topics:

• Let’s talk about cloud security shared responsibility.  How to separate the blame? Is there a good framework for apportioning blame?
• You've introduced the Cloud Shared Irresponsibilities Model, stating cloud providers will be considered partially responsible for breaches even if due to customer misconfigurations. How do you see this impacting the relationship between cloud providers and their customers? Will it lead to more collaboration or more friction?
• We both know the Jay Heiser 2015 classic “cloud is secure, but you not using it securely.” In your view, what does “use cloud securely” mean for various organizations today?
• Here is a very painful question: how to decide what cloud security should be free with cloud and what security can be paid? 
• You dealt with cloud security for a long time, what is your #1 lesson so far on how to make the cloud more secure or use the cloud more securely?
• What is the best way to learn how to cloud? What is this CloudSLAW thing?

Resources:

• EP201 Every CTO Should Be a CSTO (Or Else!) - Transformation Lessons from The Hoff
• The Cloud Shared Irresponsibilities Model
• 2002 Trustworthy computing memo
• Use Cloud Securely? What Does This Even Mean?!
• EP145 Cloud Security: Shared Responsibility, Shared Fate, Shared Faith?
• No Snow, No Flakes: Pondering Cloud Security Shared Responsibility, Again!
• Cloud Security Lab a Week (S.L.A.W)
• Megatrends drive cloud adoption—and improve security for all
• Shared fate main page
• Defining the Journey—the Four Cloud Adoption Patterns
• Celebrating 200 Episodes of Cloud Security Podcast by Google and Thanks for all the Listens!

Guest:

• Amine Besson, Tech Lead on Detection Engineering, Behemoth Cyberdefence

Topics:

• What is your best advice on detection engineering to organizations who don’t want to engineer anything in security? 
• What is the state of art when it comes to SOC ? Who is doing well? What on Earth is a fusion center? 
• Why classic “tiered SOCs” fall flat when dealing with modern threats?
• Let’s focus on a correct definition of detection as code. Can you provide yours?
• Detection x response engineering - is there a thing called “response engineering”? Should there be?
• What are your lessons learned to fuse intel, detections, and hunting ops?
• What is this SIEMless yet SOARful detection architecture?
• What’s next with OpenTIDE 2.0?

Resources:

• Guide your SOC Leaders to More Engineering Wisdom for Detection (Part 9) and other parts linked there
• Hack.lu 2023: TIDeMEC : A Detection Engineering Platform Homegrown At The EC video
• OpenTIDE · GitLab 
• OpenTIDE 1.0 Release blog
• SpectreOps blog series ‘on detection’
• Does your SOC have  NOC DNA? presentation
• Kill SOC Toil, Do SOC Eng blog (tame version)
• The original ASO paper (2021, still epic!)
• Behind the Scenes with Red Canary's Detection Engineering Team
• The DFIR Report – Real Intrusions by Real Attackers, The Truth Behind the Intrusion
• Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) | Google Cloud

Guest:

• Chris Hoff, Chief Secure Technology Officer at Last Pass

Topics:

• I learned that you have a really cool title that feels very “now” - Chief Secure Technology Officer? What’s the story here? Weirdly, I now feel that every CTO better be a CSTO or quit their job :-)
• After, ahem, not-so-recent events you had a chance to rebuild a lot of your stack, and in the process improve security. Can you share how it went, and what security capabilities are now built in?
• How much of a culture change did that require? Was it purely a technological transformation or you had to change what people do and how they do it?
• Would you recommend this to others (not the “recent events experience”, but the rebuild approach)? What benefits come from doing this before an incident occurs? Are there any?
• How are you handling telemetry collection and observability for security in the new stack? I am curious how this was modernized
• Cloud is simple, yet also complex, I think you called it “simplex.” How does this concept work?

Resources:

• Video (LinkedIn, YouTube)
• EP189 How Google Does Security Programs at Scale: CISO Insights
• EP104 CISO Walks Into the Cloud: And The Magic Starts to Happen!
• EP80 CISO Walks Into the Cloud: Frustrations, Successes, Lessons ... And Does the Risk Change?
• EP93 CISO Walks Into the Cloud: Frustrations, Successes, Lessons ... And Is My Data Secure?

Guest:

• Michael Czapinski, Security & Reliability Enthusiast, Google

Topics:

• “How Google protects its production services” paper covers how Google's infrastructure balances several crucial aspects, including security, reliability, development speed, and maintainability. How do you prioritize these competing demands in a real-world setting?
• What attack vectors do you consider most critical in the production environment, and how has Google’s defenses against these vectors improved over time?
• Can you elaborate on the concept of Foundational services and their significance in Google's security posture?
• How does your security approach adapt to this vast spectrum of sensitivity and purpose of our servers and services, actually?
• How do you implement this principle of zero touch prod for both human and service accounts within our complex infrastructure? 
• Can you talk us through the broader approach you take through Workload Security Rings and how this helps?

Resources:

• “How Google protects its production services” paper (deep!)
• SLSA framework 
• EP189 How Google Does Security Programs at Scale: CISO Insights
• EP109 How Google Does Vulnerability Management: The Not So Secret Secrets!
• EP176 Google on Google Cloud: How Google Secures Its Own Cloud Use
• EP75 How We Scale Detection and Response at Google: Automation, Metrics, Toil
• SREcon presentation on zero touch prod. 
• The SRS book (free access)

Guests:

• Michele Chubirka, Staff Cloud Security Advocate, Google Cloud
• Sita Lakshmi Sangameswaran, Senior Developer Relations Engineer, Google Cloud

Topics:

• What is your reaction to “in the cloud you are one IAM mistake away from a breach”? Do you like it or do you hate it? Or do you "it depends" it? :-)
• Everyone's talking about how "identity is the new perimeter" in the cloud. Can you break that down in simple terms?
• A lot of people say “in the cloud, you must do IAM ‘right’”. What do you think that means? What is the first or the main idea that comes to your mind when you hear it? 
• What’s this stuff about  least-privilege and separation-of-duties being less relevant? Why do they matter in the cloud that changes rapidly?
•  What are your IAM Top Pet Peeves?

Resources:

• Video  (LinkedIn, YouTube)
• EP127 Is IAM Really Fun and How to Stay Ahead of the Curve in Cloud IAM?
• EP162 IAM in the Cloud: What it Means to Do It 'Right' with Kat Traxler
• IAM: There and back again using resource hierarchies
• IAM so lost: A guide to identity in Google Cloud
• I Hate IAM: but I need it desperately
• EP33 Cloud Migrations: Security Perspectives from The Field
• EP176 Google on Google Cloud: How Google Secures Its Own Cloud Use
• EP177 Cloud Incident Confessions: Top 5 Mistakes Leading to Breaches from Mandiant
• EP188 Beyond the Buzzwords: Identity's True Role in Cloud and SaaS Security
• “Identity Crisis: The Biggest Prize in Security” paper
• “Learn to love IAM: The most important step in securing your cloud infrastructure“ Next presentation

Guests:

• Ante Gojsalic, Co-Founder & CTO at SplxAI

Topics:

• What are some of the unique challenges in securing GenAI applications compared to traditional apps?
• What current attack surfaces are most concerning for GenAI apps, and how do you see these evolving in the future?
• Do you have your very own list of top 5 GenAI threats? Everybody seem to!
• What are the most common security mistakes you see clients make with GenAI?
• Can you explain the main goals when trying to add automation to pentesting for next-gen GenAI apps? 
• What are your AI testing lessons from clients so far?

Resources:

• EP171 GenAI in the Wrong Hands: Unmasking the Threat of Malicious AI and Defending Against the Dark Side
• EP135 AI and Security: The Good, the Bad, and the Magical
• EP185 SAIF-powered Collaboration to Secure AI: CoSAI and Why It Matters to You
• SAIF.google
• Next SAIF presentation with top 5 AI security issues
• Our Security of AI Papers and Blogs Explained

Guest: 

• Travis Lanham, Uber Tech Lead (UTL) for Security Operations Engineering, Google Cloud

Topics:

• There’s been a ton of discussion in the wake of the three SIEM week about the future of SIEM-like products. We saw a lot of takes on how this augurs the future of disassembled or decoupled SIEMs. Can you explain what these disassembled SIEMs are all about?
• What are the expected upsides of detaching your SIEM interface and security capabilities from your data backend?
• Tell us about the early days of SecOps (nee Chronicle) and why we didn’t go with this approach?
• What are the upsides of a tightly coupled datastore + security experience for a SIEM?
• Are there more risks or negatives of the decoupled/decentralized approach?  Complexity and the need to assemble “at home” are on the list, right?
• One of the 50 things Google knew to be true back in the day was that product innovation comes from technical innovation, what’s the technical innovation driving decoupled SIEMs?
• So what about those security data lakes? Any insights?

Resources:

• EP139 What is Chronicle? Beyond XDR and into the Next Generation of Security Operations
• EP190 Unraveling the Security Data Fabric: Need, Benefits, and Futures
• EP184 One Week SIEM Migration: Fact or Fiction?
• Hacking Google video series
• Decoupled SIEM: Brilliant or …. Not :-)
• UNC5537 Targets Snowflake Customer Instances for Data Theft and Extortion
• So, Why Did I Join Chronicle Security? (2019)

Guest:

• Vijay Ganti, Director of Product Management, Google Cloud Security

Topics:

• What have been the biggest pain points for organizations trying to use threat intelligence (TI)?
• Why has it been so difficult to convert threat knowledge into effective security measures in the past?
• In the realm of AI, there's often hype (and people who assume “it’s all hype”). What's genuinely different about AI now, particularly in the context of threat intelligence?
• Can you explain the concept of "AI-driven operationalization" in Google TI? How does it work in practice?
• What's the balance between human expertise and AI in the TI process? Are there specific areas where you see the balance between human and AI involvement shifting in a few years?
• Google Threat Intelligence aims to be different. Why are we better from client PoV?

Resources:

• Google Threat Intel website
• “Future of Brain” book by Gary Marcus et al
• Detection engineering blog (Part 9) and the series
• Detect engineering blogs by David French
• The pyramid of pain blog, the classic
• “Scaling Up Malware Analysis with Gemini 1.5 Flash” and “From Assistant to Analyst: The Power of Gemini 1.5 Pro for Malware Analysis” blogs on Gemini for security

Cross-over hosts:

• Kaslin Fields, co-host at Kubernetes Podcast

• Abdel Sghiouar, co-host at Kubernetes Podcast

Guest:

• Michele Chubirka, Cloud Security Advocate, Google Cloud

Topics:

• How would you approach answering the question ”what is more secure, container or a virtual machine (VM)?”
• Could you elaborate on the real-world implications of this for security, and perhaps provide some examples of when one might be a more suitable choice than the other?
• While containers boast a smaller attack surface (what about the orchestrator though?), VMs present a full operating system. How should organizations weigh these factors against each other?
• The speed of patching and updates is a clear advantage of containers. How significant is this in the context of today's rapidly evolving threat landscape? Are there any strategies organizations can employ to mitigate the slower update cycles associated with VMs?
• Both containers and VMs can be susceptible to misconfigurations, but container orchestration systems introduce another layer of complexity. How can organizations address this complexity and minimize the risk of misconfigurations leading to security vulnerabilities?
• What about combining containers and VMs. Can you provide some concrete examples of how this might be implemented? What benefits can organizations expect from such an approach, and what challenges might they face?
• How do you envision the security landscape for containers and VMs evolving in the coming years? Are there any emerging trends or technologies that could significantly impact the way we approach security for these two technologies?

Resources:

• Container Security, with Michele Chubrika (the same episode - with extras! - at our peer podcast, “Kubernetes Podcast from Google”)
• EP105 Security Architect View: Cloud Migration Successes, Failures and Lessons
• EP54 Container Security: The Past or The Future?
• DORA 2024 report
• Container Security: It’s All About the Supply Chain - Michele Chubirka
• Software composition analysis (SCA)
• DevSecOps Decisioning Principles
• Kubernetes CIS Benchmark
• Cloud-Native Consumption Principles
• State of WebAssembly outside the Browser - Abdel Sghiouar
• Why Perfect Compliance Is the Enemy of Good Kubernetes Security - Michele Chubirka - KubeCon NA 2024

Guest:

• Daniel Shechter, Co-Founder and CEO at Miggo Security

Topics:

• Why do we need Application Detection and Response (ADR)? BTW, how do you define it?
• Isn’t ADR a subset of CDR (for cloud)?  What is the key difference that sets ADR apart from traditional EDR and CDR tools?
• Why can’t I just send my application data - or eBPF traces - to my SIEM and achieve the goals of ADR that way?
• We had RASP and it failed due to instrumentation complexities. How does an ADR solution address these challenges and make it easier for security teams to adopt and implement?
• What are the key inputs into an ADR tool?
• Can you explain how your ADR correlates cloud, container, and application contexts to provide a better  view of threats? Could you share real-world examples of types of badness solved for users?
• How would ADR work with other application security technologies like DAST/SAST, WAF and ASPM?
• What are your thoughts on the evolution of ADR?

Resources:

• EP157 Decoding CDR & CIRA: What Happens When SecOps Meets Cloud
• EP143 Cloud Security Remediation: The Biggest Headache?
• Miggo research re: vulnerability ALBeast
• “WhatDR or What Detection Domain Needs Its Own Tools?” blog
• “Making Sense of the Application Security Product Market” blog
• “Effective Vulnerability Management: Managing Risk in the Vulnerable Digital Ecosystem“ book