About Mark Nunnikhoven

Mark Nunnikhoven explores the impact of technology on individuals, organizations, and communities through the lens of privacy and security. Asking the question, "How can we better protect our information?" Mark studies the world of cybercrime to better understand the risks and threats to our digital world. As the Vice President of Cloud Research at Trend Micro, a long time Amazon Web Services Advanced Technology Partner and provider of security tools for the AWS Cloud, Mark uses that knowledge to help organizations around the world modernize their security practices by taking advantage of the power of the AWS Cloud. With a strong focus on automation, he helps bridge the gap between DevOps and traditional security through his writing, speaking, teaching, and by engaging with the AWS community.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/marknca
Personal website: https://markn.ca/
Trend Micro website: https://www.trendmicro.com/

Watch this episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/aPg7WE3Q3SQ

Transcript:

Jeremy: Hi, everyone. I'm Jeremy Daly, and this is Serverless Chats. Today I am speaking with Mark Nunnikhoven. Hey, Mark. Thanks for joining me.

Mark: Thanks for having me, Jeremy.

Jeremy: So you are the vice president of cloud research at Trend Micro. So why don't you tell listeners a little bit about your background and what Trend Micro is all about?

Mark: Yeah, so Trend Micro is a global cybersecurity provider. We make products for consumers all the way through to massive enterprises. And I focus in our research wing. So we have a really large research component. There's about 1400 researchers in the company, which is a lot of fun, because we get to dive into the minutia of anything and everything related to cybersecurity, so from the latest cybercrime scam to where I focus, which is in the cloud. So a lot more what I'm looking at is how organizations are adapting to the new reality of things like the shared responsibility model, keeping pace with cloud service providers, adjusting to DevOps philosophies, that kind of thing, which is a lot of fun.

And for me, I come from a very traditional security background, if there is such a thing. I've been at Trend for a little over eight years. Before that, I was with the Canadian federal government for a decade, doing all sorts of different security work, a lot of nation state attacks and defense, things like that. And my background in education is actually in forensic investigation, so that nerd in the lab on your favorite crime drama when they come up with the burned-out hard drives and are like, "Fix this," and somehow they do, it's all BS, but that's technically what I do.

Jeremy: Very cool. All right. So I have wanted you on the show for a very long time, because I've been following the stuff that you've been doing. I love the videos that you do, the blogs that you write. You're just out there. And I know you're on the edge of the serverless space, I know you do a lot of stuff in the cloud as well, but you're obviously into serverless as well. And just recently I came across this impact assessment video series that you're doing. I don't know if it's a regular series or whatever, but it was really good. And you were talking about Fortnite and Apple, and I want to get into that. But really what made me think about things a little bit deeper that goes beyond just some of these surface-level billionaires arguing with billionaires is this idea of privacy and how important are online privacy is. And I thought it'd be really interesting to talk about how serverless and privacy, since it's in the cloud, is all the stuff that you're sharing, where that kind of aligns. So let's start. First of all, why is privacy or online privacy so important?

Mark: Yeah. That's a really broad and great question. So yeah, this new video series I'm doing, Impact Assessment, is going to be regular. I was doing a livestream called "Mornings with Mark" for the last few years, did, I think, like 200 episodes where it was mainly talking about cybersecurity issues of the day, and a lot of those are privacy. And where I wanted to go with this new series was just a little broader audience, which is why Apple and Fortnite and Twitter hack and stuff like that are coming up, because I think privacy is a really important aspect, and it mirrors security. You can't have one without the other. And it's directly related to the audience, to people who are building in a serverless space or in any space.

But privacy, a traditional definition of privacy is really your right as a person to not be observed, essentially to be alone and to have control over your data and your well-being. And when you go into the digital world, it's infinitely more complicated than a physical world, right? You can lock yourself away in a room in the real world and be relatively confident that nobody is invading that space, that you have kind of control over that space, so if you want to just sit there and veg out, if you want to read a book, that's an activity just amongst yourself, right? When you come to the digital world, everything we do leaves a trail somewhere. There are tons of exposures potentially. You as a user don't really have a ton of control over your data.

And one of the things that I wanted to do with this video series and with a bunch of my other work was just enlighten people to help sort of expose this so that they're aware, because one of the challenges I get on the security side of what I do, and it directly relates to the privacy side, is that people assume there are correct decisions. And really, the only incorrect decision is one that you are unaware that you're making. So you could make the argument that it's okay that you're tracked everywhere on the internet, and I think the trade-off you get for the free services may be correct, but if you're unaware that that is the trade-off, I think that's the problem. So that's the intention behind this video series, is to look at privacy issues, to look at some security issues, to help people just make a conscious decision instead of just being pulled along for the ride.

Jeremy: Right. Yeah, no, and I think that that's probably something that a lot of people miss, is that people say, "Well, I'll sign up for Facebook, and I will share every photo, every place that I visit, all my friends, all my likes, all my dislikes." And what I think people say is, "Oh, well, whatever. It's free." And they don't realize that they're the product, and most of that is because they are giving up so much of their privacy.

And it's actually funny. This just happened the other day to me, and I didn't even realize. I knew it was coming out, but Chrome just released a new update that blocked third-party cookies if they weren't... I think you had to have like "secure" on and some of these other things. So no user is going to have any idea what that actually means. But what happened for something we were doing is, we were loading a third-party cookie behind the scenes for something, and all of a sudden that stopped working. And so the whole flow of this module or this modal pop-up thing completely broke because of that extra thing of security. And I remember way back in the days of early web development dealing with IE5 and IE6 and the browser wars, like what works on this browser and what works on that browser. Now privacy seems to be the new browser war thing that are conflating those two things.

But anyway, so that's one thin...