Coming up in this special Mini-Series on Breaking Badness.
Welcome to our Breaking Badness mini-series, Stronger Together, the theme of RSA 2023. This series is a different format from our weekly security news. Instead, this special segment on the podcast is made up of eleven individual interviews with thought leaders from the infosecurity industry.
You’ll hear from researchers, intelligence analysts, security advocates, VPs, and C-suites. This series features:
- Allan Liska, Ransomware Researcher at Recorded Future
- Katie Nickels, Director of Intelligence at Red Canary
- Lesley Carhart, Director of Incident Response at Dragos
- Ben April, Chief Technology Officer at Maltego Technologies
- Jamie Williams, Principal Adversary Emulation Engineer at MITRE
- Corey Thuen, Founder & CEO of Gravwell
- Don Jeter, Chief Marketing Officer at Torq
- Jeff Stout, Senior Abuse & Fraud Cloud Security Architect at Akamai
- Renee Burton, Senior Director of Threat Intelligence at InfoBlox
- Jon DiMaggio, Chief Security Analyst at Analyst1
- And of course, we’ll hear from DomainTools folks including:
- CEO Tim Chen
- CRO Chris Nelson
- CISO and perennial Breaking Badness guest Daniel Schwalbe
- And many more!
In this mini-series, there were some clear themes, but like the tagline of the event itself, the one that sticks out the most is collaboration. It’s interesting to hear about the connections people are able to make in person, as many repeatedly reported that this RSA is back to “pre-Covid” RSA attendance, and how from those relationships, we can work together to give bad actors more bad days.
Allan Liska
In this episode for the Stronger Together Mini-Series, we are joined by Allan Liska, Ransomware Researcher at Recorded Future. We sat down (or rather, stood and leaned against a wall away from noise) to discuss his path to infosec, interesting talks at RSA, liberal arts and cybersecurity, a pending passion project, and general geeking out over DNS.
RESOURCES:
Ransomware, 2nd Edition: Understand. Prevent. Recover
Bloomberg’s Foundering: The John McAfee Story – Live
Who Says Cybersecurity Can’t Be Creative?
Jamie Williams, Jon DiMaggio, Corey Thuen, and Renee Burton
In our second installment of our Stronger Together Mini-Series, we’re joined by researchers, threat analysts, and C-Suites including Jamie Williams from MITRE ATT&CK, Jon DiMaggio from Analyst1, Corey Thuen from GravWell, and Renee Burton from InfoBlox.
Each conversation was fascinating in their own ways. I was excited to meet Jamie because we had met on Twitter, specifically regarding the Strengthening Neurodiversity in Cybersecurity blog post Travis and Ian had written. It was great to continue that discussion from a new point of view. We also talk about his thoughts on AI, Twitter and the cybersecurity community, and we’ll learn just a bit about wine.
Resources:
Strengthening Neurodiversity in Cybersecurity
I’m grateful to Allan Liska for making the introduction between myself and Jon DiMaggio. This was a fascinating discussion on Jon’s background as a threat researcher specifically focused on ransomware currently. We’ll talk about his experience with the LockBit ransomware gang, what he’s currently passionate about in the industry and conversely, what he finds concerning, and a walk through of a day in the life of a threat researcher.
Resources:
Corey Thuen is one of the Founders and CEO of GravWell to talk about his time at RSA, his thoughts on AI and what could potentially be concerning, the talent shortage within cybersecurity and how we could remedy that, and what he’s excited about for GravWell this year.
Finally, we’re joined by Renee Burton who is the Senior Director of Threat Intelligence at InfoBlox. We’ll talk about her role at InfoBlox: hint: it involves a lot of DNS, what keeps her up at night, and how we can better collaborate with each other within the industry.
Katie Nickels, Don Jeter, Ben April, Lesley Carhart, and Jeff Stout
We’ve made it to the third installment of our Stronger Together Mini Series! In this episode we’re joined by researchers, threat analysts, and C-Suites including Katie Nickels from Red Canary and the SANS Institute, Don Jeter from Torq, Ben April from Maltego, Lesley Carhart from Dragos, and Jeff Stout from Akamai.
This is again exciting for me on a personal level because these are people I have been following on social media and it’s fantastic to be able to meet them in person for the first time. We have some great discussions on the pros and cons of AI, protecting industrial control systems, imposter syndrome, and more.
Katie Nickels
We’ve been joined by Katie Nickels on the podcast before and I will link to that episode in our show notes if you want to go back and check it out, but we were lucky enough to catch up with her at RSA where we discuss her work with the SANS Institute, what she’s finding concerning in the industry right now and conversely, what she’s excited about, and some of the work she does with the Cyberjutsu Girls Academy.
Resources:
Upcoming Courses at the SANS Institute
Don Jeter
I was excited to meet Don who is a fellow marketer at the Torq booth at RSA. As you can imagine or as you have experienced at RSA, it’s like drinking from a fire hose so I’m lucky I got the time I did with Don. We talk about who Torq is, hyper automation, and what’s in store for Torq for the remainder of the year.
Ben April
I caught up with Ben April, CTO at Maltego who is no longer the only North American at Maltego. We talk about the pros and cons of generative AI, his advice for newbies in the industry, and new releases for Maltego.
Resources:
Lesley Carhart
Lesley Carhart and I had a chance to meet in real life. I’ve been following them on social media for a while and again I cannot stress enough how fun it is to meet people in person at these events. Lesley discusses their work which focuses on industrial control systems and poses questions we might not be thinking about with enough regularity like “what if our sewer system didn’t work for a month?” It’s a very interesting conversation I’m so excited to share with you all. Stay tuned.
Jeff Stout
I love serendipitous moments and meeting Jeff Stout of Akamai definitely falls into this category. I think they had the best booth at RSA because they had popsicles, which really hit the spot after kind of yell-talking for a while. We got to talking and scheduled some time for podcasting right then and there. He talks about the history of Akamai, what he’s most proud of during his tenure there, what’s concerning him in the industry, and some great advice to keep people in the industry energized.
Catch Up With DomainTools
We’ve made it to the final installment of our Stronger Together Mini-Series! In this episode, you’ll hear from more folks here at DomainTools, including our CEO Tim Chen, CRO Chris Nelson, and our veteran podcast guest, CISO Daniel Schwalbe. We’ll also hear from team members such as Fatima Saladis, Anthony Viera, Larry Jacobs, Will Woods, and James Newcombe.
We hope you enjoy getting to know our team more intimately as they briefly share their backgrounds, tips for RSA, and what about the conference most excites them.
Resources:
Breaking Badness, The Best of 2022
Intro To Threat Hunting with Farsight DNSDB
Introducing the New Iris Investigate
That’s about all we have for this week, you can find us on Twitter @domaintools, all of the articles mentioned in our podcast will always be included in our blog. Catch us Wednesdays at 9 AM Pacific time when we publish our next podcast and blog.
*A special thanks to John Roderick for our incredible podcast music!
