The Cyber Ranch Podcast

Every trail ride ends at the, well, end of the trail.

This is the end of the trail for The Cyber Ranch Podcast.

Drew and Allan offer final parting thoughts and conduct brief interviews with 3 folks whose presence was vital to the show:  Chris Cochran, Ron Eddings, and Rich Salim.

It's been an amazing journey and we thank ALL of you who ever listened to even just one snippet of one episode.

Y'all stay good now!

Howdy, y’all, and welcome to The Cyber Ranch Podcast.  Today we tackle WHY? 

More importantly, WHY do we all keep doing the same things over and over, saying the same things over and over, and expecting better results?

WHAT  can we change?

Join Allan Alford, many times CISO, and cybersecurity podcaster of many years now.  Joining Allan is Drew Simonis, who has been co-hosting the show now for 21 episodes, and a guest a few times before that.

This show is a chance to understand the premise of the show better, to understand Drew better, and to find out why we're all here.  Drew's bonafides:

Drew joined as co-host because he’s a deep thinker, and because he applies that deep thinking to challenging the status quo.

Allan's WHY? Is very simple.  We’ve not grown or progressed as an industry in years now.  Which means we are clearly doing something wrong.  Mostly, IMHO, resting on our laurels, making the same assumptions, trying the same techniques, and not questioning any of it.

Drew offers a more nuanced take on the idea of "speaking the language of the business".  It's a great show.  Y'all be good now!

We have all had a vague sense that our world is being manipulated, informed and fed by various conscious manipulation tactics - influence on political campaigns on social media, culture wars, class wars, etc.  But we can glean out the facts and figure out who is telling what story if we embrace a new discipline - Narrative Intelligence.

Our guest this week is Joe Stradinger, Founder and CEO of EdgeTheory, who are out to understand and leverage the conversations that shape our world.  Specifically, social media campaigns and presences.  Think threat intelligence but at a global/sociopolitical level.  Joe has been an investor, he has worked in DC, and he has a lot of academic ties as well.  His knowledge in this space is immense, and we are tickled pink to have him here at the ‘Ranch.

We ask Joe:

It's an excellent conversation, well worth a listen.

Y'all be good now!

Howdy, y’all, and welcome to The Cyber Ranch Podcast!  That’s Jon Green, an experienced CISO but also an experienced CTO.  Jon is currently the CSO and CTO at HPE’s Aruba.  He’s also a DefCon goon and a Team8 Villager.  He’s done the marketing engineer side, the network engineer side…  Quite a storied past.  We are thrilled to be talking with him about the differences between CSO/CISO and CTO.  Jon, thank you so much for joining us at the ‘Ranch!

Y'all be good now!

Howdy, y’all, and welcome to The Cyber Ranch Podcast!  Our guest is Thomas Krane, Managing Director at Insight Partners.  If you go to Thomas’ LinkedIn page, you will also see that he works with a number of cybersecurity scaleups (we'll define that term).  As such, Thomas is uniquely qualified to speak to some trends in the industry.  Drew asked Thomas to join us here at the ‘Ranch to discuss quite a few facets of the industry.  Thomas, thank you for coming on down to the ‘Ranch!

Y'all be good now!

This week Allan attended the HIP Global conference in New Orleans, which happens to be Allan's favorite city in America.

The conference was outstanding - no sales pitches, no nonsense, just many experts speaking on the topic of securing identity.  Entra ID, Okta, AD folks all were present, and it was amazing.

Allan got to interview some AMAZING guests from all walks of identity life, including one gentleman whose pedigree includes a rather critical national role right out the White House...

Listen in as Allan asks the following questions (one of which Drew answers too!)

Y'all be good now!

In this episode Allan and Drew consult Tim Rohrbaugh, who has done quite a lot of research and work on the practical applications, deployment, use cases and limits of GenAI and LLM.

• Flavors and incarnations of AI - GenAI, Expert Systems, ML...

It's a great show and you will most definitely learn a lot!  Thank you Tim, thank you, listeners!  Y'all be good now!

Howdy, y'all!  With American presidential elections already under way, Allan and Drew decided that scrambling to get Kirsten Davies on the show for this week's show (the last one before formal Election Day) was paramount.  Kirsten has been on our potential guest list for years now, as she is a multiple-times Fortune 500 CISO.

But now Kirsten is CEO and Founder of The Institute for Cyber Civics, a non-partisan non-profit aimed at empowering poll workers and poll volunteers to recognize and deal with cyber attacks on the voting process.

Hear about Kirsten's charter, mission, vision, goals and capabilities in this SPECIAL EDITION! episode!

Y'all be good now!

Our guest today is Babbette Jackson, aka Technically__Rose of YouTube and Instagram fame!

Babbette is in DLP and Insider threat analysis.  She has worked in places as far flung as Edward Jones, Juniper Networks, and Bank of America.  More importantly, Babbette is quite involved in the intersection of social media and community engagement.

How do we use social media to engage others across generations and to and encourage community participation?

Allan, Drew and Babbette discuss:

• We’ve been talking to others about how they arrived in and either struggled or flourished in Cyber.  What is your story?

It is a wonderful show, and Babbette is a wonderful guest who is willing to share the insights behind her success.  Y'all be good now!

Who and what you are, your personality, your style, your thoughts...  That’s all about to change.  For one thing you are already a product on “free to use” social media.  You don’t really own things you think you own (We're looking at you, Steam!)  Even your intellectual property is up for grabs now in ways you can’t see coming.  Hollywood actors are selling the rights to their digital likenesses, and meanwhile, others are stealing such rights via technological loopholes.  All media exists, according to Drew, to draw you towards the advertisements…  And your deepfake could be used to do just that to others.  Some of these fakes are good enough to fool yourself even.

Join Allan and Drew as they interview Sam Rad, a premier futurist and humanist, who freely admits that there is now an inherent tension between those two philosophies.

The conversations about the governance, ethics, and security of all this new media and technology are woefully behind the curve.

Many members of the TikTok generation has a 4-second attention span and require multiple simultaneous input streams at any given time to feel satisfied.  Is this a deliberate attack on the Western human nervous system?  Cyberattacks are certainly killing people already, why not go straight for their brains?

Are the peasants coming with pitchforks and torches to destroy Frankenstein’s newest monster?  How about the striking dockworkers?  The terrorists destroying 5G towers?  Do peasants with pitchforks ever win?  Ned (mistakenly called “Jason” by Allan)  Ludd and the Luddites failed in a big way to stop technology from replacing their jobs in the late 1700s (mistakenly referred to as the having happened in the Victorian era by Allan)

This show is peppered with others such historical and cultural references such as the cultures and economies in Second Life, Picasso’s mass production of his own paintings, Rousseau’s evolving concepts of property, Mary Shelly and her Frankenstein’s monster, Hegel’s model of “thesis, antithesis, synthesis”, the Butlerian Jihad from the “Dune” series, and William Gibson’s maxim that, “The street finds its uses for things”.

We’re not even coping with all of this, and now we have the AI conversation thrust upon us as well…  Your content is training data, and can be mimicked with uncanny accuracy as well.

Check out Sam’s book, “Radical Next” and her docuseries “Illicit Economies of the Shadowverse” to learn more about the positives and negatives of all of these trends in humanity.

Good luck out there.  Stay safe.  Who you are and what you own is irretrievably altered at this point.  Cybersecurity is really just “security” now.  But hopefully all this mess will create the next cultural and creative Renaissance.

Y'all be safe now...