Charles Nwatu is an engineering manager in Netflix's Security, Technology Assurance & Risk organization. He joins Ryan on the show to talk about a career pivot from U.S. gov service into cybersecurity in Silicon Valley, the exciting parts of compliance and risk management, and why newcomers should consider jobs in SOCs to kickstart security careers.

Links:

• Charles Nwatu on LinkedIn — Corporate Security & Security, Technology Assurance & Risk, Netflix
• How Netflix’s Charles Nwatu Turned His Desire to Help People Into a Career in Information Security

Director of Internet Analyis at Kentik, Doug Madory, joins the podcast to shed light on the mysterious appearance of unused IPv4 space belonging to the US Department of Defense: the strange connection to a Florida company now managing the world's largest honeypot; the odd Inauguration Day timing of this discovery;, and why enterprise network defenders should pay very close attention.

Links:

• The Mystery of AS8003 — On January 20, 2021, a great mystery appeared in the internet’s global routing table. An entity that hadn’t been heard from in over a decade began announcing large swaths of formerly unused IPv4 address space belonging to the U.S. Department of Defense.
• Pentagon explains odd transfer of 175 million IP addresses to obscure company | Ars Technica — "Did someone at the Defense Department sell off part of the military's vast collection of sought-after IP addresses as Trump left office? Had the Pentagon finally acted on demands to unload the billions of dollars worth of IP address space the military has been sitting on, largely unused, for decades?"
• AS8003 GRS-DOD

Sponsored by Eclypsium

Chris Castaldo has a fascinating career in cybersecurity. A U.S. army veteran who dabbled in tech during the early 2000s dot-com boom before settling on security, Castaldo is now CISO at Crossbeam and a decision-maker with a bird's eye view into how the should be protected.

Castaldo joins Ryan on the show to talk about his new book on securing the startup, why he's the rare CISO that loves security vendor briefings and demos, and his vision of the CISO's top priorities.

Shubham Shah is a brilliant hacker who quit his pen-testing job to hack for cash in bug-bounty programs. He quickly mastered the game of automating automating pre-breach reconnaissance and zero in on common webapp programming and configuration errors. Shubs, now co-founder at Assetnote, joined Ryan on the show to talk about the stressful life of a fulltime bug-bounty hunter, advancements in web app security defense, and how automation is completely rewriting the bug-discovery business.

Links:

• Assetnote
• Shubs Shah: Hacking on Bug Bounties for Four Years
• High frequency security: 120 days, 120 bugs
• h2c Smuggling: Request Smuggling Via HTTP/2 Cleartext (h2c)
• H2C Smuggling in the Wild

Newly appointed Executive Editor at VentureBeat Fahmida Rashid joins the show to talk about her introduction to computer networking in school, her winding path into cybersecurity journalism, the security stories worth telling, the venture capital ecosystem, and the surge in unicorn cybersecurity startups.

Links:

• Follow Fahmida on Twitter
• Fahmida Rashid on LinkedIn

Microsoft's David Weston joins Ryan on the show to discuss a new report that shows 83% of organizations have been hit by a firmware attack in the last two years.

As businesses continue to under-invest in resources to prevent firmware attacks, Weston warns about the inevitability of advanced attacks at the 'invisible' layer, the absence of skills and tools to find malicious activity in firmware, the nightmare of navigating the patching treadmill, and exciting tech innovation in the space.

At age 16, Lena Smart finished high school and went into the workforce. At the time, a university degree and advanced education were not available to her in a single-parent household in Scotland. Today, she is CISO of MongoDB, a $16 billion company with thousands of employees around the world and she is a leading voice on education and talent-identification in cybersecurity.

Lena joins Ryan on the show to tell stories from her childhood, the decisions that carved a path for a successful career in security, the anguish of imposter syndrome, the joys of building a modern security program, and impressive tech innovation moving the security needle.

Patrick Howell O’Neill is the cybersecurity senior editor for MIT Technology Review. In this out-of-band episode of the show, Patrick joins Ryan to discuss his latest scoop on Google Project Zero's visibility into malware used in a Western .gov counter-terrorism operation, the tricky nature of attributing nation-state backed attacks, Apple's iOS becoming a hot target and the controversies surrounding all of these conversations. Follow Patrick on Twitter.

After a 20-year career working in the offensive security reseach trenches, security industry pioneer Nico Waisman made the transition to defense to head up privacy and security efforts at ride-sharing firm Lyft. Waisman joins Ryan Naraine on the show to talk about early hacking in Argentina, the contributions of non-Americans to the security industry, and much much more...

Ron Brash joins Ryan Naraine on the show to talk about the recent water supply hack, the state of security in ICS/SCADA installations, the checklist of affordable things for critical infrastructure defenders, and the things we should worry -- and not worry -- about.

Ron is Director of Cyber Security Insights at Verve Industrial Protection, a critical infrastructure-focused organisation that sells services and products that work across IT and OT environments for effective cyber security, controls and management.