How can we prove cybersecurity effectiveness?

With USD 124 billion being spent worldwide on IT security last year alone, it's no wonder this is a question many would like the answer to. However, finding a quantitative metric to evaluate security investments, outside of positive effects like diminishing risks and reducing the amount of bad things happening, is not straight forward.
 
To help us navigate this question, Robby is joined by someone with a lot of experience making security investments effective. Brian Contos has a long list of merits after his more than two decades of experience working in the cybersecurity field. He has also written several security books and is an award-winning podcaster. Brian is now CISO & VP Technology Innovation in Mandiant Security Validation, also known as Verodin, a business platform for measuring and managing cybersecurity effectiveness.

Technical level: 1/5

Host: Robby Peralta
Producer: Paul Jæger

https://mnemonic.no/podcast

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For this Norwegian episode of the mnemonic security podcast, Robby and co-host for the day Manager of Governance, Risk & Compliance at mnemonic, Gjermund Vidhammer, are joined by two major actors in the Norwegian cyber landscape: Robin Bakke, Specialist Director for Cyber Security at the Ministry of Justice & Public Security, and Bente Hoff, Director National Cyber Security Center (NCSC) at the Norwegian National Security Authority (NSM). 

They discuss the importance, and the many different arenas, of private-public cooperation both in Norway and internationally, and share the Ministry and NSM’s thoughts on what’s important for digital security these days – and where they see most risk.

Related reading:
Nasjonal strategi for digital sikkerhet: https://www.regjeringen.no/no/dokumenter/nasjonal-strategi-for-digital-sikkerhet/id2627177/
Nasjonal Sikkerhetsmåned: https://norsis.no/nsm/

Technical level: 1/5

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How can we best apply data science techniques to gain security visibility? 

What data you collect obviously affects your detection capabilities, but as many have painfully experienced; there can be too much of a good thing!

In this episode, Robby is joined by Jeff Barto. He is the Chief Security Officer at a large hedge fund in the US, has worked in security for over 20 years and has a lot of experience asking himself the question “how much data is enough?”. Jeff takes us through what types of data is he collecting and why, and how to collect data smartly to get the detection capabilities you need. 

Robby and Jeff also discuss their take on the future of data science and security visibility, and whether now is the time to ditch people and leave security for the machines? 

Technical level: 3/5

https://mnemonic.no/podcast 

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How effective is the use of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) in security? Are they even relevant, and if so, do KPIs work differently for security teams than others?

In this episode, Robby chats with someone that’s had a lot to do with KPIs, both in his position as the former Head of the government CERT in Denmark (GovCERT), as well as a SOC Analyst for more than 10 years. Marc Andersen shares his experiences chasing KPIs, and discusses whether self-governance is a better alternative for security teams. 

Technical level: 1/5

Host: Robby Peralta

Producer: Paul Jæger

https://mnemonic.no/podcast 

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Who better to continue our Operational Technology (OT) miniseries with than KraftCERT, the Norwegian Energy and Control System CERT!

KraftCERT helps industrial control system (ICS) related industries establish incident response teams, build digital security processes, and get a better understanding of the threat landscape. With us for this episode, we've invited someone that has been with KraftCERT from the start; Senior Security Analyst Lars Erik Smevold.

Lars Erik shares with us what affects the threat landscape for KraftCERT's member organisations, the most common threats he's seeing targeting them, and how he hopes the industry will continue to move towards making cyber incidents targeting ICS and OT systems public.

Stay tuned for more OT specific episodes, where we look into the security challenges in the OT space, in the coming weeks.

Technical level: 1/5

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For this episode, Robby has invited two experts that see privileged access management (PAM) from two different viewpoints. From the customer side he has Thor Milde, SVP and Head of IT Security Services in Norway's largest bank DNB, share his PAM journey - and from the consultant side Michele Paci, IAM Executive Architect in IBM, explains what he's learned after working with identity and access for a large portion of his professional life.

In the episode, they share insights from both sides of the fence on how most companies are handling PAM today, the effects of cloud on the PAM world and how they would like to see PAM evolve in the future.

Technical level: 3/5

Host: Robby Peralta

Producer: Paul Jæger

https://mnemonic.no/podcast 

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In this episode, we continue our Operational Technology (OT) miniseries where we look into the security challenges in the OT space. 

This time, Robby chats with PhD Andrea Carcano on the importance of visibility in OT environments. Andrea is passionate about the security of industrial control systems (ICS), and the Co-Founder of Nozomi Networks, a US based industrial cyber security company helping many of the largest industrial sites around the world.

They discuss the role of threat intelligence in the OT sphere, how to understand what you actually have inside your critical infrastructure, and what challenges he talks to his customers about nowadays.

Stay tuned for more OT specific episodes in the coming weeks.

Technical level: 2/5

Host: Robby Peralta
Producer: Paul Jæger

https://mnemonic.no/podcast

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In this episode, Robby chats with Erlend Gjære, Co-founder and CEO of Secure Practice, on how to turn an organisation’s users into its last line of defense against email threats. 

Erlend has spent most of his career studying people and their email habits. At Secure Practice he combines scientific research and employee behavior to find out how to best reach through with security awareness messaging in organisations, by identifying why people do what they do, how they do it, and most importantly, how to make them do it securely.

Robby and Erlend discuss email as an attack vector, and what companies are doing to protect themselves. They also talk about what is actually working nowadays in terms of security awareness, and what the most successful companies are doing. 

Technical level: 1/5

Host: Robby Peralta
Producer: Paul Jæger

Suggested reading:
https://www.mnemonic.no/security-report-2020/the-missing-link-in-email-security

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The CISO role in Operational Technology (OT) means securing environments where digital and physical worlds meet, and where a service disruption in the digital space can have a direct and immediate impact on our physical world.

In this episode, Robby wants to know how a CISO handles the challenge of securing both IT and OT environments.

To kick off our miniseries on OT, Robby welcomes Karsten Duus Wetteland, CISO at BKK. BKK is a leading organisation within renewable energy, working to replace fossil fuels by electrifying everything from fishfarms, cars and cruise ships, to the oil and gas industry's offshore power supplies.

Karsten shares how they are finding new methods to identify risks when the risk spectrum spans from trees falling over power lines to hacked fish tanks. And how to avoid IT risks becoming OT risks.

Stay tuned for more OT specific episodes in the coming weeks.


Technical level: 1/5

Host: Robby Peralta
Producer: Paul Jæger


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In this episode, Robby chats with two experts from mnemonic that are highly passionate about microservices; security researcher Andreas Claesson and Head of Development of our Argus security platform, Joakim von Brandis.

Andreas explains how he works with microservices with customers, and what the dark side of microservices are regarding security. Joakim returns to the podcast to show how mnemonic's Argus security platform made the transition over to microservices. If you haven't heard Joakim's first episode, we recommend you check it out (episode 4 - Under the hood of Argus).

Have a listen to learn how microservices are useful, and what companies that use microservices should be monitoring for.

Technical level: 3/5

Host: Robby Peralta
Producer: Peter Harket

Show notes:
https://www.mnemonic.no/security-report-2019/ 
https://www.mnemonic.no/globalassets/security-report/serverless-security.pdf
https://www.mnemonic.no/mnemonic-security-podcast/episode-4/
https://aws.amazon.com/whitepapers/

https://mnemonic.no/podcast 

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