Hacker Valley Blue

In this episode of Hacker Valley Blue, host Davin is joined by Christopher Peacock, a Detection Engineer at SCYTHE, to discuss all things blue team. Christopher explores why asset management is a great security starting point for small organizations and why advanced persistent threats (APTs) are becoming increasingly difficult to defend against. He emphasizes the importance of red and blue team collaboration and takes time to share his career advice to those looking to break into the field.

Guest Bio: 

Chris is an Adversary Emulation - Detection Engineer at SCYTHE, specializing in Purple Team Exercises and Detection Engineering. His previous experience includes multiple roles such as Cyber Threat Intelligence Analyst, Cyber Threat Hunter, Tier 3 SOC Analyst, Incident Responder, Cyber Security Consultant, and Purple Team Lead. He previously worked at Raytheon Intelligence & Space as well as General Dynamics Ordnance and Tactical Systems. Additionally, he has experience in multiple industries, including Energy, Finance, Healthcare, Technology, and Defense. Current certifications include GCTI, GCFA, GCED, eJPT, and CSIS.

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In this episode of Hacker Valley Blue, host Davin is joined by John Stoner and Andy Piazza to talk about the current state of cyber threat intelligence. John and Andy explore the gap that exists between technical team leads and security leadership, the urgent need for more entry and junior level hires in the field, as well as their favorite CTI resources and tools. Lastly, they share their tips and advice to those interested in breaking into cybersecurity. 

Guest Bio: 

Andy Piazza is a threat management expert with experience across multiple fields of operations, ranging from high level strategic management down to tactical/technical field ops. Led diverse teams in high-stress environments world-wide, from counter-narcotics to cyber threat analysis; achieving complex mission objectives through focusing on team development and process maturation.

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In this episode of Hacker Valley Blue, Davin is joined by the founder and COO of MaxProd Technologies, Marcus Bowie, to share his story from helpdesk, to SOC analyst, to business owner. Marcus shares how he leveraged his resourcefulness and work ethic to fast track his on-the-job work experience. Marcus explores how he strived for success, built on his knowledge over time, and pivoted to new job opportunities along the way. He takes a deep dive into how he and blue teams stay sharp and prepared against emerging threats as well as his thoughts on the skills gap in cybersecurity. Lastly, Marcus gives his tips and advice for newcomers breaking into the field. 

Guest Bio:

Founder and COO of MaxProd Technologies. Marcus has 12+ years of experience in Information Technology. He has supported several agencies including Department of State Diplomat Security and Department of Homeland Security Customs Border & Patrol. Marcus is now supporting the Department of Energy as a Cyber Security Engineer and Nuclear Regulatory Commission as a Forensics SME. 

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How do you use threat intelligence to inform your decision making? In this episode, Davin and guest Katie Nickles take a deep dive into cyber threat intelligence. Katie explores the role threat intelligence plays in determining an organization’s security posture, how threat intel helps blue teams stay ahead of and anticipate emerging threats, and what the day-to-day of a Director of Intelligence looks like. Katie shares her passion for teaching and nurturing the next generation of cybersecurity professionals and getting more girls/women interested in tech. Lastly, Kaite shares why she feels asset inventory is an inexpensive solution and great starting point for companies looking to kick off a security program.

Guest Bio:

Katie Nickels is the Director of Intelligence for Red Canary as well as a SANS Instructor for FOR578: Cyber Threat Intelligence and a non-resident Senior Fellow for the Atlantic Council’s Cyber Statecraft Initiative. She has worked in cyber threat intelligence and network defense for over a decade for the U.S. DoD, MITRE, Raytheon, and ManTech.

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When red and blue forces unite, everyone wins. Eric Belardo joins Davin in this episode to discuss the benefits of blue and red teams working together, the challenges blue teamers face, and the benefits of diversity of thought. Be sure to tune in to this impactful episode of Hacker Valley Blue: The Defenders.

Guest Bio:

Eric Belardo is a former CISO and experienced professional with over 30 years experience in Cyber Security Risk Management, Security Operations Center Management & Operations, Security Architecture (COBIT, TOGAF, DODAF), Application Security, Security Operations Management, Penetration testing and GRC. He is also a former Forensics Investigator and Instructor. OT/ICS/PLC/SCADA and IT security.

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Welcome to episode 1 of season 3 for Hacker Valley Blue! In this season, host Davin Jackson will be gathering the BEST blue team defenders in the field to share their expert advice, tips and strategies to up your defensive game in cybersecurity.

In this episode Davin is joined by Lesley Carhart, an ICS Incident Response and hacker extraordinaire. The two take a deep dive into Lesley’s cyber background, address blue teaming common misconceptions, and where her “hacks for pancakes” tagline comes from. 

Guest Bio: 

Lesley Carhart is a Principal Incident Responder at the industrial cyber security company Dragos, Inc. She has spent the last 14 years of her 20+ year IT career specializing in information security, with a heavy focus on incident response to nation-state adversary attacks. Prior to Dragos, she was the incident response team lead at Motorola Solutions, performing digital forensics and incident handling services for both enterprise and public safety customers. Her focus at Dragos is developing forensics and incident response tools and processes for uncharted areas of industrial systems. She is also a curriculum developer and instructor for the Dragos “Assessing, Hunting and Monitoring Industrial Control System Networks” course.

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This is the finale of Know Thyself. What an incredible journey, we feel like this entire experience flew by so fast, we got to talk to so many incredible people about knowing yourself, knowing your team, knowing your tech stack, knowing your environment, and even knowing your story.

Make your organization better make your security posture better, strive for impact, what are the most high leverage things that you can do today to make everybody's lives easier, or more safe, and then yield the feedback, there might be some things that you might be missing, you might need to ask questions, ask for feedback, get some information from your stakeholders, what what are you thinking about that I might not be thinking about? asking these different things is how you know thyself. And this is how you get to know the people that are around you, your peers, your stakeholders, the more knowledge you have got started with that Sun Tzu quote, in the very beginning of the podcast, if you know yourself and you know your enemy, you need not fear the results of 100 battles. So if you really understand yourself, and you have good threat intelligence, understanding the externals, you have good vulnerability management that understands the externals and the internals, if you mash all that information together, I think you'll be able to do great things with your cybersecurity program.

Key Takeaways

0:02 Introduction to the show

0:49 Our Sponsor, Axonius 

2:09 Welcome back

2:31 Reflecting on Know Thyself

3:17 Recap This Seasons Guest

3:22 Marcus Carey

4:17 John Strand

5:05 Aaron Reinhart & Jamie Dixon

5:54 Chaos Engineering

7:12 Lenny Zeltser, asset inventory

7:54 Kevin Allison, Storytelling is a soft skill

10:19 John Strand

12:13 Can we do better?

13:54 What kind of leader are you?

14:26 Do you have unsupported devices?

17:34 Ask yourself these questions

13:33 Go back to the EASY Framework

21:50 Learning

23:29 Exploration

24:00 Immersion

27:28 Reach Hacker Valley

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In this masterclass of HVB season 2 we brought in a master story teller in Kevin Allison. The biggest thing is to get a person to understand, don't just summarize, don't just walk us through a Wikipedia like where you're just giving us a broad overview. And you're explaining; it’s important to remember sensory details that will help us see almost like movie scenes, what was happening between people. That is what brings the story alive. So that's a good case right there where the bones of the story were incredible. Like that's just on paper and an incredible overview of a story, but it's not going to work unless you can fill in all those sensory details that bring it alive and make it emotional for us.

Storytelling is a soft skill that offers the ability to contextualize cybersecurity in a manner that any organization can understand to allow their business to stay safe.

Key Takeaways:

0:00 Previously on the show

2:37 Kevin introduction

3:20 Episode begins

3:39 Where Kevin is today

7:58 Kevin’s origin story

12:04 Cybersecurity is performing

17:08 Storytelling for business

21:00 Engineering a story

26:12 Authentic storytelling

34:54 Speaking isn’t perfect

41:02 Where to find Kevin

The Story Studio

RISK!: True Stories People Never Thought They’d Dare To Share

RISK! Podcast

Twitter

Facebook

Instagram

Risk Show Podcast

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If want to get into computer security, you're going to learn to love it, you're going to have to be successful, because a lot of computer security isn't just about bits and bytes, it's really about effectively communicating what needs to be done to the right people.

In this episode we have the incredible John Strand. Organizations need to become more proactive, and see where those weak spots are to protect themselves from something like ransomware. You need to run a pen test because you can have somebody literally launch those attacks, and identify those weaknesses in those vulnerabilities before the bad people do.

What's the gap that we can all learn from? It's passwords. By and large for most users, passphrases are the way to go. And, multi-factor authentication is actually a very sound strategy.

If you look at one key tenant of computer security, complexity is the enemy of computer security. And security is constantly trying to catch up and protect against yesterday's attacks. So, the future is more connected, it's more complicated. And the problem is, we still have people that use weak passwords, we still have people that click on links from strangers. And ultimately, when we're looking at that future, you're going to see the exact same problems that we've always had complicated on a much, much, much, much, much larger scale. As things get more and more pushed to the cloud. There'll be no shelter here, the front line is everywhere. World of computer security. 

Key Takeaways:

0:00 Previously on the show

John Strand on Twitter

John Strand on LinkedIn

Black Hills Information Security

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In this episode, we brought in two exceptional guests that are no stranger to chaos. In fact, they've identified ways to engineer for chaos. In the studio, we have Aaron Rinehart, CTO, and founder at Verica. We also have Jamie Dicken, former manager of applied security at Cardinal Health and current director at Resilience. These two are also authors of Security Chaos Engineering. If you haven't read that book it's already out, you should check it out. 

Chaos engineering is the technique of introducing turbulent conditions into a distributed system to try to determine the conditions that cause it to fail before it actually fails. So they simplify it. What we do with chaos engineering is learn about the system without experiencing the pain of an outage or an incident. You learn to trust your gear by testing.

The biggest impact really came once we understood how security chaos engineering fits into the bigger security picture. It's not about just being a part of the latest and greatest techniques and having the excitement of doing something that's cutting edge, but security chaos engineering at the end of the day. It's useless unless what you've learned drives change. 

Key Takeaways:

0:00 Previously on the show

1:40 Aaron Rinehart and Jamie Dixon introduction 

2:08 Episode begins

2:59 What Jamie and Aaron are doing today

3:13 What Jamie is doing

4:13 What Aaron is doing

5:00 Discuss chaos engineering

9:26 Importance of chaos engineering

10:16 Myths of chaos engineering

12:55 Chaos engineering customer impacts

17:34 Learning to trust the test and end result

19:03 Reader and customer feedback

22:21 Chaos engineering gone wrong

27:39 Implementing change in cybersecurity

28:11 Building a team of experts

39:08 Getting involved in chaos engineering 

41:09 Tools for listeners

43:25 Keeping up with Aaron and Jamie

Aaron Rinehart on Twitter

[email protected]

Jamie Dicken on Twitter

Verica on LinkedIn

Verica Free Book 

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