Sean and I connect with a former pharmaceutical IT professional and now-CEO of DataLocker, Jay Kim. While focused on IT problems, Jay found himself in the crosshairs of the Y2K phenomenon and got a real taste for what the “A” meant in the information security CIA Triad (Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability). As a consequence of his choice to be in IT, Jay found himself on a business trip where he met an engineer with a novel idea about manufacturing secure external hard drives.

We’ve had a number of Their Story conversations with the team at Juniper Networks over the years; many of them happened to be with our good friend Mounir Hahad. We were happy to have the opportunity to sit down with him once more for another chat.

Have a listen to see if you agree with Mounir’s perspective; maybe now is a good time to double-check if you are doing everything you can when it comes to protecting your systems and data across the infrastructure you’ve deployed for your business.

As it often happens, when we do not know who the author is for an excellent wisdom quote, we attribute to Confucius. This quote below doesn't belong to him either, but we certainly cannot deny the value and truth that comes with it:

"Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life."

It can be a tour de force as we have a limited amount of time and an almost unlimited number of topics we can chat about. Yes, we can all agree that the InfoSec industry has become a variegated field with a great variety of people and stories. We sure love that, but when storytime is also lunchtime, it takes a special topic to get the energy level up and starting the podcast by telling stories about the early days (1970’s) of the Atari 800 can have that reinvigorating effect. That’s exactly what Marco and I did when we spoke with Darren Mar-Elia from Semperis. That wasn’t all that we spoke about though—that was just the ice-breaker for the chat we had.

Keep it simple, they say. With technology—and cybersecurity—most of the time, this is way easier said than done; especially when you set out from the start to solve very complex problems. But you know what you can do? You can look at these problems from a different angle and make your mission and goal to find solutions that are simple to deploy and manage.

You’ve likely heard that cybercriminals run their underground businesses similar to those seen in public—they have employees, managers, executives—they have formal business processes, employ marketing tactics, use innovative technologies, and even employ machine learning, artificial intelligence, and automation to help them get the best return—they have a supply chain to help the cybercriminal community make the most of their business ventures—and, with this, of course, there is a ton of supply and demand up and down the cybercrime stack.

The timing was perfect to have this conversation since the Ponemon Institute and Devo put together a new research-driven report, Improving The Effectiveness Of The SOC. Marco was happy to join me to discuss the results with Dimitri and Matt, and we uncovered some additional elements to consider when a poor user experience is delivered with a security application or service. Without giving everything away, I will leave you with one word: burnout.

“Water drops hit the wet stone floor. The sound reverberates in the distance.”

“I see there is somebody lurking in the shadow here.”

“Grunt__”

“Sean?__”

“Grunt__” “Grunt__”

“He couldn't sound creepier if he tries to sound creepier__”

“I could try.”

“He could probably be.“

“He probably could. He probably could__ anxious laugh.”

“Evil laugh echoes in the emptiness of the dark corridor__”

This was not scripted. It just happened.

This conversation gets even better as we dig deeper into BlueKeep than I thought we would/could—plus we got to discuss some other research and tool development on which this duo are working … all things designed to help organizations identify and mitigate the risks they face when it comes to some of the potentially-nastiest exploits in recent times if the negative stars were to line up properly.

Once upon a time, there was an idea. It was a good one. It was so good that it became a flawless product and an extremely successful company overnight.

And they lived successfully and happily ever after.

— The End

The story of the latest “overnight success” took years to bring together...