Enterprise Security Weekly

Spoiler: it's probably in your pocket or sitting on the table in front of you, right now!

Modern smartphones are conveniently well-suited for identity verification. They have microphones, cameras, depth sensors, and fingerprint readers in some cases. With face scanning quickly becoming the de facto technology used for identity verification, it was a no-brainer for Nametag to build a solution around mobile devices to address employment scams.

Segment Resources:

• Company website
• Aaron's book, Loyal

Listeners of the show are probably aware (possibly painfully aware) that I spend a lot of time analyzing breaches to understand how failures occurred. Every breach story contains lessons organizations can learn from to avoid suffering the same fate. A few details make today's breach story particularly interesting:

• It was a Chinese APT
• Maybe the B or C team? They seemed to be having a hard time
• Their target was a blind spot for both the defender AND the attacker

Segment Resources:

• https://www.binarydefense.com/resources/blog/shining-a-light-in-the-dark-how-binary-defense-uncovered-an-apt-lurking-in-shadows-of-it/
• https://www.theregister.com/2024/09/18/chinesespiesfoundonushqfirm_network/

This week, in the enterprise security news,

1. Semgrep raises a lotta money
2. CYE acquires Solvo
3. Sophos completes the Secureworks acquisition
4. SailPoint prepares for IPO
5. Summarizing the 2024 cybersecurity market
6. Lawyers that specialize in keeping breach details secret
7. Scientists torture AI
8. Make sure to offboard your S3 buckets
9. extinguish fires with bass

All that and more, on this episode of Enterprise Security Weekly.

Visit https://www.securityweekly.com/esw for all the latest episodes!

Celebrating and Elevating Women in Cyber: Recently, International Women in Cyber Day (September 1) highlighted the ongoing challenges women face in the cybersecurity field, as well as the progress made in recent years. Women bring exceptional skills and knowledge to cybersecurity; however, it is estimated that they make up only 20% to 25% of the cybersecurity workforce—a percentage that has remained stagnant for years. Even more concerning, women often hit a glass ceiling just six to ten years into their cybersecurity careers. Lynn Dohm sheds light on these issues and emphasizes what the industry needs to focus on to continue celebrating and elevating women in cyber.

Segment Resources:

• 2023 State of Inclusion Benchmark in Cybersecurity
• 2024 Cyber Talent Study by N2K and WiCyS
• WiCyS Programs

This week, we've added an extra news segment just on AI. Not because we wanted to, but because the news cycle has bludgeoned us into it. My mom is asking about Chinese AI, my neighbor wants to know why his stocks tanked, my clients want to know how to prevent their employees from using DeepSeek, it's a mess.

First, a DeepSeek primer, so we can make sure all Enterprise Security Weekly listeners know what they need to know. Then we get into some other AI news stories.

DeepSeek Primer

I think the most interesting aspect of the DeepSeek announcements is the business/market impact, which isn't really security-related, but could have some impact on security teams. By introducing models that are cheaper to train, sell access to, and less demanding to run on systems, DeepSeek has opened up more market opportunities. That means we'll see generative AI used in markets and ways that didn't make sense before, because it was too expensive.

Another aspect that's really confusing is what DeepSeek is or does. For the most part, when someone says "DeepSeek", they could be referring to:

• the company
• the open source models released by the company
• the SaaS service (https://chat.deepseek.com)
• the mobile app (which is effectively just a front end for #3)
• the API (which is what the mobile app and SaaS service are built on top of)

From a security perspective, there's little to no operational risk around downloading and using the models, though they're likely to get banned, so companies could get in trouble for using them. As for the app, API, or SaaS service, assume everything you type into them is getting collected by China (so, significantly less safe, probably no US companies should do this).

But because these services are crazy cheap right now, I wouldn't be surprised if some suppliers and third parties will start using DeepSeek - if your third party service provider is using DeepSeek behind the scenes with your data, you still have problem #2, so best to ensure they're not doing this through updated contract language and call to confirm that they're not currently doing it (can take a while to get a new contract in place).

This week in the enterprise security weekly news, we discuss

1. funding and acquisitions
2. Understanding the Semgrep license drama
3. Ridiculous vulnerabilities everywhere:
4. vulns to take down your entire city’s cell service
5. vulns to mess with your Subarus
6. vulns in Microsoft 365 authentication
7. cybersecurity regulations are worthless
8. Facebook is banning people for mentioning Linux
9. Vigilantes on Github
10. Mastercard DNS error
11. Qubes OS
12. Turning a "No" into a conversation

All that and more, on this episode of Enterprise Security Weekly!

Visit https://www.securityweekly.com/esw for all the latest episodes!

HackerOne's co-founder, Michiel Prins walks us through the latest new offensive security service: AI red teaming.

At the same time enterprises are globally trying to figure out how to QA and red team generative AI models like LLMs, early adopters are challenged to scale these tests. Crowdsourced bug bounty platforms are a natural place to turn for assistance with scaling this work, though, as we'll discuss on this episode, it is unlike anything bug hunters have ever tackled before.

Segment Resources:

• https://www.hackerone.com/ai/snap-ai-red-teaming
• https://www.hackerone.com/thought-leadership/ai-safety-red-teaming

This interview is a bit different from our norm. We talk to the founder and CEO of OpenVPN about what it is like to operate a business based on open source, particularly through trying times like the recent pandemic. How do you compete when your competitors are free to build products using your software and IP? It seems like an oxymoron, but an open source-based business actually has some significant advantages over the closed source commercial approach.

In this week's enterprise security news,

1. the first cybersecurity IPO in 3.5 years!
2. new companies
3. new tools
4. the fate of CISA and the cyber safety review board
5. things we learned about AI in 2024
6. is the humanless SOC possible?
7. NGFWs have some surprising vulnerabilities
8. what did generative music sound like in 1996?

All that and more, on this episode of Enterprise Security Weekly.

Visit https://www.securityweekly.com/esw for all the latest episodes!

Today's data landscape is undergoing a seismic shift with increasing regulatory pressures, rapid acceleration to the cloud, and AI adoption. Join BigID's CEO and Co-Founder, Dimitri Sirota, to learn how organizations can adopt a holistic approach to their data security and compliance strategy to keep up with the revolution in data, transforming their data into a competitive advantage.

This segment is sponsored by BigID! Start protecting your sensitive data wherever your data lives at https://securityweekly.com/bigid.

I've been so excited to see the external attack surface management (EASM) market take off in the past few years. This market category focuses exclusively on security issues exposed to the public Internet - issues ANYONE can see.

All organizations have exposure management problems, but industries that are traditionally underfunded when it comes to cybersecurity and IT are particularly worse off. We see breaches in these industries every day - industries like manufacturing, healthcare, and education. Of course, exposure issues don't stop at the network boundary - all organizations have internal exposures to worry about as well.

With all the breaches we see every week, we've become somewhat desensitized to them. Is it possible to address even just the most critical exposures (a fraction of 1% of all vulnerabilities) in one of the most underfunded industries? In this episode, we dive into how a small school system in New Mexico took on this challenge.

This week in the enterprise news - Cymulate acquires CYNC Secure, Tidal Cyber acquires Zero-Shot, Amazon ransomware attack, and more!

Visit https://www.securityweekly.com/esw for all the latest episodes!

We're thrilled to have Frank Duff on to discuss threat-informed defense. As one of the MITRE folks that helped create MITRE ATT&CK and ATT&CK evaluations, Frank has been working on how best to define and communicate attack language for many years now. The company he founded, Tidal Cyber is in a unique position to both leverage what MITRE has built with ATT&CK and help enterprises operationalize it.

Segment Resources:

• Tidal Cyber website
• Tidal Cyber Community Edition

We're a fan of hacker lore and history here at Security Weekly. In fact, Paul's Security Weekly has interviewed some of the most notable (and notorious) personalities from both the business side of the industry and the hacker community.

We're very excited to share this new effort to document hacker history through in-person interviews. The series is called "Where Warlocks Stay Up Late", and is the creation of Nathan Sportsman and other folks at Praetorian. The timing is crucial, as a lot of the original hackers and tech innovators are getting older, and we've already lost a few.

References:

• Check out the Where the Warlocks Stay Up Late website and subscribe to get notified of each episode as it is released
• Check out the anthropological hacker map and relive your misspent youth!

In this latest Enterprise Security Weekly episode, we explored some significant cybersecurity developments, starting with Veracode’s acquisition of Phylum, a company specializing in detecting malicious code in open-source libraries. The acquisition sparked speculation that it might be more about Veracode staying relevant in a rapidly evolving market rather than a strategic growth move, especially given the rising influence of AI-driven code analysis tools. We also covered One Password's acquisition of a UK-based shadow IT detection firm, raising interesting questions about their expansion into access management. Notably, the deal involved celebrity investors like Matthew McConaughey and Ashton Kutcher, suggesting a trend where Hollywood influence intersects with cybersecurity branding.

A major highlight was the Cyber Haven breach, where a compromised Chrome extension update led to stolen credentials. The attack was executed through a phishing campaign disguised as a Google policy violation warning. To their credit, Cyber Haven responded swiftly, pulling the extension within two hours and maintaining transparency throughout. This incident underscored broader concerns around the poor security of browser extensions, an issue that continues to be exploited due to lax marketplace oversight.

We also reflected on Corey Doctorow's concept of "Enshittification," critiquing platforms that prioritize profit and engagement metrics over genuine user experiences. His decision to disable vanity metrics resonated, especially considering how often engagement numbers are inflated in corporate settings. The episode wrapped with a thoughtful discussion on how CISOs can say "no" more effectively, emphasizing "yes, but" strategies and the importance of consistency. We also debated the usability frustrations of "magic links" for authentication, arguing that simpler alternatives like passkeys or multi-factor codes could offer a better balance between security and convenience.

Visit https://www.securityweekly.com/esw for all the latest episodes!

Since D3FEND was founded to fill a gap created by the MITRE ATT&CK Matrix, it has come a long way. We discuss the details of the 1.0 release of D3FEND with Peter in this episode, along with some of the new tools they've built to go along with this milestone.

To use MITRE's own words to describe the gap this project fills:

"it is necessary that practitioners know not only what threats a capability claims to address, but specifically how those threats are addressed from an engineering perspective, and under what circumstances the solution would work"

Segment Resources:

• https://d3fend.mitre.org

In the enterprise security news,

1. a final few fundings before the year closes out
2. Arctic Wolf buys Cylance from Blackberry for cheap, a sentence that feels very weird to say
3. the quiet HTTPS revolution
4. passkeys are REALLY catching on
5. resilience keeps showing up in the titles of news items
6. Apple Intelligence insults the BBC’s intelligence
7. MITRE ATT&CK evals drama
8. Lastpass breach drama continues

All that and more, on this episode of Enterprise Security Weekly

As we wrap up the year, we have an honest discussion about how important security really is to the business. We discuss some of Katie's predictions for AppSec in 2025, as well as "what sucks" in security!

Visit https://www.securityweekly.com/esw for all the latest episodes!

For our second year now, Mike Privette, from Return on Security and the Security, Funded newsletter joins us to discuss the year's highlights and what's to come in the next 12 months.

In some ways, it has been a return to form for funding, though some casualties of a tough market likely had to seek acquisition when they might have otherwise raised another round and stayed independent a while longer. We'll cover some stats, talk 2025 IPO market, and discuss the likelihood of (already) being in another bubble, particularly with regards to the already saturated AI security market.

It won't be all financial trends though, we'll discuss some of the technical market trends, whether they're finding market fit, and how ~50ish AI SOC startups could possibly survive in such a crowded space.

In this segment, we discuss two new FIDO Alliance standards focused on credential portability. Specifically, if passwordless is going to catch on, we need to minimize friction and maximize usability. In practice, this means that passkeys must be portable!

Rew Islam of Dashlane joins us to discuss the new standards and how they'll help us enter a new age of secure authentication, both for consumers and the enterprise.

Segment Resources:

• Elevating Passwordless Security With AWS Nitro
• Synced Passkeys Will Be Portable
• FIDO Alliance Publishes New Specifications to Promote User Choice and Enhanced UX for Passkeys

This week, in the enterprise security news,

NOTE: We didn't get to 2, 3, 5, or 7 due to some technical difficulties and time constraints, but we'll hit them next week! The show notes have been updated to reflect what we actually discussed this week: https://www.scworld.com/podcast-segment/13370-enterprise-security-weekly-387

1. Snowflake takes security more seriously
2. Microsoft takes security more seriously
3. US Government takes telecom security more seriously
4. Cleo Capital takes security more seriously
5. EU’s DORA takes effect soon
6. Is phishing and security awareness training worthless?
7. CISOs need financial literacy
8. Supply chain firewall is basic but useful

All that and more, on this episode of Enterprise Security Weekly.

Visit https://www.securityweekly.com/esw for all the latest episodes!

In this final installment of a trio of discussions with Theresa Lanowitz about Cyber Resilience, we put it all together and attempt to figure out what the road to cyber resilience looks like, and what barriers security leaders will have to tackle along the way. We'll discuss:

• How to identify these barriers to cyber resilience
• Be secure by design
• Align cybersecurity investments with the business

Also, be sure to check out the first two installments of this series!

• Episode 380: Cybersecurity Success is Business Success
• Episode 383: Cybersecurity Budgets: The Journey from Reactive to Proactive

This segment is sponsored by LevelBlue. Visit https://securityweekly.com/levelblue to learn more about them!

When focused on cybersecurity through a vulnerability management lens, it's tempting to see the problem as a race between exploit development and patching speed. This is a false narrative, however. While there are hundreds of thousands of vulnerabilities, each requiring unique exploits, the number of post-exploit actions is finite. Small, even.

Although Log4j was seemingly ubiquitous and easy to exploit, we discovered the Log4Shell attack wasn't particularly useful when organizations had strong outbound filters in place.

Today, we'll discuss an often overlooked advantage defenders have: mitigating controls like traffic filtering and application control that can prevent a wide range of attack techniques.

This segment is sponsored by ThreatLocker. Visit https://securityweekly.com/threatlocker to learn more about them!

This week, in the enterprise security news,

1. Funding and acquisition news slows down as we get into the “I’m more focused on holiday shopping season”
2. North Pole Security picked an appropriate time to raise some seed funding
3. Breaking news, it’s still super easy to exfiltrate data
4. The Nearest Neighbor Attack
5. Agentic Security is the next buzzword you’re going to be tired of soon
6. Frustrations with separating work from personal in the Apple device ecosystem
7. We check in on the AI SOC and see how it’s going
8. Office surveillance technology gives us the creeps

All that and more, on this episode of Enterprise Security Weekly.

Visit https://www.securityweekly.com/esw for all the latest episodes!

Check out this episode from the ESW Vault, hand picked by main host Adrian Sanabria! This segment was originally published on December 22, 2023.

We're excited to give an end-of-year readout on the performance of the cybersecurity industry with Mike Privette, founder of Return on Security and author of the weekly Security, Funded newsletter. This year, this podcast has leaned heavily on the Security, Funded newsletter to prep for our news segment, as it provides a great summary of all the funding and M&A events going on each week.

In this segment, we look back at 2023, statistics for the year, comparisons to 2022, interesting insights, predictions, and more!

Segment Resources:

Mike's blog; Return on Security: https://www.returnonsecurity.com/ Mike's newsletter; Security, Funded: https://www.returnonsecurity.com/subscribe

This is a topic our hosts are very passionate about, and we're excited to discuss with Mariana Padilla, co-founder and CEO of Hackerverse. She wants to change how cybersecurity sales works, with a focus on making the process more transparent and ideally demonstrating a product's efficacy before buyers even need to talk to a sales team.

We'll discuss why existing sales processes are broken, how VC funding impacts vendor sales/marketing, and why community-led growth is so important.

Why a special segment on Microsoft Ignite announcements?

1. There were a lot of announcements
2. Microsoft is the largest security vendor, in terms of revenue
3. Microsoft and its products are also the biggest and most vulnerable hacking target in the tech industry.

In the enterprise security news,

1. Bitsight, Snyk, and Silverfort announce acquisitions
2. Tanium announces an “autonomous” endpoint security offering
3. We find out how much a smartphone costs when it is manufactured in the US
4. CISA’s leadership announces resignations
5. Ransomware is going after old versions of Excel
6. Should vendors be doing more about alert fatigue?
7. The latest cybersecurity reports
8. Using AI to mess with scammers

All that and more, on this episode of Enterprise Security Weekly.

Visit https://www.securityweekly.com/esw for all the latest episodes!