Guest:  

• Nader Zaveri, Senior Manager of IR and Remediation at Mandiant, now part of Google Cloud

Topics:

• Could we start with a story of a cloud incident response (IR) failure and where things went wrong? 
• What should that team have done to get it right? 
• Are there skills that matter more in cloud incidents than they do for on-prem incidents? Are there on-prem instincts that will lead incident responders astray in cloud?
• What 3 things an IR team leader needs to do to prepare his team for IR in the cloud?
• Are there on-premise tools that can stay on prem and not join us in the cloud?
• What processes should we leave behind? Keep with us?
• What logs and context should we prepare for cloud IR?  What access should we have behind “break glass”?
• While doing IR, what things should we look at in the cloud logs (which logs, also?) to expedite the investigation?

Resources:

• “How to Cloud IR or Why Attackers Become Cloud Native Faster?” (ep98)
• “How to prepare for detection & response in the cloud” Google Cloud Next 2022 presentation
• “Security Incident Response in the Cloud: A Few Ideas” blog
• GCP Cloud Logging
• “Security at Scale: Logging in AWS” paper
• “AWS Security Incident Response Whitepaper” paper

Guest: 

• Sunil Potti, VP / GM, Google Cloud

Topics:

• One of the biggest shifts we’ve noticed is the shift from building security because we think security is good, to building security as a business. How did you make that cultural shift happen in our organization? 
• With organizations migrating to cloud we have a set of tradeoffs between meeting security teams where they are with on-prem expectations of security vs cloud-native approaches. How do you think about investing in next generation products vs holding the hands of CISOs just stepping into the cloud?
• What matters more to you as a leader, secure cloud (GCP, Workspace) or security products (Chronicle SecOps, BCE, SCC, etc)?
• Is invisible security the same as “building security in”? Aren’t there security controls where the value is derived from them being visible to users?
• Mandiant brings services expertise to Google Cloud, typically not our strong area and not our DNA, how do we plan to make the most of Mandiant within Google’s culture?

Resources:

• Simon Sinek “Start With Why” book

Guest: 

• Jim Higgins, CISO at Snap,  former CISO at Square

Topics:

1. You were at Google for a long time, and at Google you sat between Google security and Cloud. Now that you're leading security for a major company, how are you prioritizing your focus between your on-premise resources and your cloud resources? 
2. How are you thinking about threat detection in the Cloud?
3. In detection, how has your technology changed? How has your process changed? What threats do you mostly focus on?
4. Why don’t we talk about the role of automation in detection and response (D&R)? How do you approach automation and eliminating toil?
5. As you're scaling teams, processes and technology for your cloud footprint, what has been easiest to get right and what's been hardest to get right?
6. How do you approach measuring security? What cloud metrics are you sharing upwards to your board?

Resources:

• BeyondCorp Enterprise
• “Ghost in the Wires: My Adventures as the World's Most Wanted Hacker” book

Guests:

• John Speed Meyers, Security Data Scientist, Chainguard
• Todd Kulesza, User Experience Researcher, Google

Topics:

• How did you get involved with this year’s Accelerate State of DevOps Report (DORA report)?
• So what is DORA and why did you decide to focus on supply chain security for the 2022 report?
• What are the big learnings from this year’s report?
• What’s the difference between SLSA and SSDF? Is one spicy and the other savory? How’re companies adopting these and how is adoption going? 
• Are there other areas that DevOps can be a contributor in the overall security landscape? 
• How can CISOs rope DevOps fully into their security gang?
• Operationally, how should security and developers and DevOps come together to keep vulnerabilities out in the first place?
• How should security and developers and DevOps come together to respond quickly to vulnerabilities when they’re discovered?
• How do security and developers and DevOps come together to prove to their auditors and customers that they’re doing a good job of the above?

Resources:

• 2022 Accelerate State of DevOps Report
• "New insights for defending the software supply chain" blog (and new report)
• SLSA.dev site
• Secure Software Development Framework at NIST
• “Linking Up The Pieces: Software Supply Chain Security at Google and Beyond” (ep24)
• “Sharing The Mic In Cyber with STMIC Hosts Lauren and Christina: Representation, Psychological Safety, Security” (ep92)
• Go vulncheck tool 
• “Reflections on Trusting Trust” paper  (1984)

Guests:

• Nikhil Sinha, Group Product Manager, Workspace Security
• Kelly Anderson, Product Marketing Manager, Workspace Security

Topics:

• We are talking about Google Workspace security today. What kinds of threats do we have to care about here?
• Are there compliance-related motivations for security here too? Is compliance in the cloud changing?
• How’s adoption of hardware keys for MFA going for your users, and how are you helping them? 
• Is phishing finally solved because of that? 
• Can you explain why hardware security FIDO/WebAuthn is such a step function compared to, say, RSA number generator tokens? 
• Have there been assumptions in the Workspace security model we had to change because of WFH? And what changes with RTO and permanent hybrid?

Resources:

• Google BeyondCorp Enterprise
• “Make zero trust a reality with Google Workspace security solutions” Next 2022 video
• “2021: Phishing is Solved?” (ep40)
• “Zero Trust: Fast Forward from 2010 to 2021” (ep8)

Guests:

• Matt Linton, Chaos Specialist @ Google
• John Stone, Chaos Coordinator @ Office of the CISO, Google Cloud

Topics:

• Let’s talk about security incident response in the cloud.  Back in 2014 when I [Anton] first touched on this, the #1 challenge was getting the data to investigate as cloud providers had few logs available. What are the top 2022 cloud incident response challenges?
• Does cloud change the definition of a security incident? Is “exposed storage bucket” an incident? Is vulnerability an incident in the cloud?
• What should I have in my incident response plans for the cloud? Should I have a separate cloud IR plan?
• What is our advice on running incident response jointly with a CSP like us?
• How would 3rd party firms (like, well, Mandiant) work with a client and a CSP during an investigation?
• We all read the Threat Horizons reports, but can you remind us of the common causes for cloud incidents we observed recently? What goals do the attackers typically pursue there?

Resources:

• “Building Secure and Reliable Systems” book (especially ch 14-16, and ch17)
• Google Cybersecurity Action Team Threat Horizons Report #4 Is Out! (#3, #2, #1)
• “Incident Plan vs Incident Planning?” blog (2013)

Guest:

• Greg Sinclair, Security Engineer @ Google Cloud

Topics:

• Could you tell us a bit about your background and how you ended up here at Google? Also, tell us about your team here?
• We're very excited about the release of the CobaltStrike rules. Could you share more about what they are looking for and second why this is so valuable?
• How did CobaltStrike come to be so widely used by bad guys?
• When you were doing this research what was the most surprising thing you uncovered?
• Could you tell us about the coordinated disclosure aspects of this work?
• In the past you've contributed research to our Threat Horizons reports, could you tell us about that?

Resources:

• Making CobaltStike harder for threat actors to abuse blog
• CobaltStrike YARA-L rules
• CobaltStrike site
• “Cobalt Strike Usage Explodes Among Cybercrooks”
• Google Cybersecurity Action Team Threat Horizons Report #4 Is Out!
• Detection as Code? No, Detection as COOKING!

Guest:

• Jeff Bollinger,  Director of Incident Response and Detection Engineering @ Linkedin 

Topics:

• Observability sounds cool (please define it for us BTW), but relating it to security has been “hand-wavy” at best. What is your opinion on the relevance of observability data for security use cases? What use cases are those, apart from saving the data for IR just in case?
• How can we best approach observability in the cloud, particularly around network communications, so that we improve security as a result?
• Are there other areas of cloud where observability might be more relevant? Does the massive shift to TLS 1.3 impact this?
• If the Internet is shifting towards an end-user/device centric model with everything as a service (SaaS), how does security monitoring even work anymore? 
• Does it mean the end of both endpoint and network eras and the arrival of the application security monitoring era?
• Can we do deep monitoring of complex applications and app clusters for abuse or should we just focus on identity and profiling?

Resources:

• “Instrumenting Modern Application Stack for Detection and Response” (ep34)
• “Crafting the InfoSec Playbook: Security Monitoring and Incident Response Master Plan” by Jeff Bollinger, Brandon Enright, Matthew Valites (book)
• RFC 7258  Pervasive Monitoring Is an Attack
• RFC 8890 Internet is for end users
• “(Re)building Threat Detection and Incident Response at LinkedIn”
• “Martian Chronicles“ by Ray Bradberry (because migrating to cloud is like flying to Mars)

Guests:

• Alijca Cade, Director, Financial Services, Office of the CISO, Google Cloud
• Ken Westin, Director, Security Strategy, Cybereason
• Robert Wallace, Senior Director, Mandiant, now Google Cloud

Topics:

• How are cloud environments attacked and compromised today? Is it still about the configuration mistakes?
• Do cryptominers represent a serious threat now that they are often mentioned as the most common threat in the cloud?
• Let’s look at another popular threat - ransomware or, broadly, RansomOps. Based on your research, what can we say about its likely future, especially in the cloud?
• Are we getting better with detection in the cloud and are we doing it fast enough?
• Is cloud security a misnomer? Attackers are out to get into an organization, and cloud or on-premise matters less here, right? What does it say about the interdependence of security, on and off cloud?

Resources:

• LIVE @ Security Talks: The Cloud Security Podcast at Cloud Security Talks Q3 2022
• Google Cybersecurity Action Team Threat Horizons Report #4 Is Out!

Guest: 

• Dr Anna Belak, Director of Thought Leadership at Sysdig, former Gartner analyst

Questions:

• Analysts (and vendors) coined a log of “C-something acronyms” for cloud security, and two of the people on this episode were directly involved in some of them. What do you make of all the cloud security acronym proliferation?
• What is CSPM? What gets better when you deploy it?
• What is CWPP? Does anything get better when you deploy it?
• What is CNAPP? What gets better when you deploy it?
• What is CIEM, Anton’s least fave acronym?
• Now, what about CDR? 

Resources:

• Gartner acronym glossary
• “Container Security: The Past or The Future?” (ep54, with Anna as well)
• “Automate and/or Die?” (ep3)
• “Impersonating Service Accounts in GCP and Beyond: Cloud Security Is About IAM?” (ep60)
• “Powering Secure SaaS … But Not with CASB? Cloud Detection and Response?” (ep76)
• “Does the World Need Cloud Detection and Response (CDR)?”
• “Announcing Virtual Machine Threat Detection now generally available to Cloud customers”
• Sysdig Threat Report Blog
• 2022 Sysdig Cloud-Native Threat Report 
• Anatomy of Cloud Attacks