The Cyber Ranch Podcast

Howdy, y’all, and welcome to The Cyber Ranch Podcast.  Today we tackle WHY?  Why do we have this show?  Why do we ask the questions we ask and host the guests we host?  Why does any of this matter?

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 y...

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 ...

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...

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.  Th...

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 ...

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...
• Biomimicry and Allan's weird sea cucumber references
• Practical LLM deployment - Tim's maxims
• Offline or online?  Open or proprietary models?
• Precision, accuracy, asking the right question...

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 em...

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 ...

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...

Jason Shockey, CISO of Cenlar FSB, and 25 year veteran of cybersecurity, has a formula for running an excellent cybersecurity program.

He studied a great deal in his various cybersecurity roles before leaping into a CISO role, and the studying paid off!

Jason and Allan and Drew discuss the following:

• Identifying Common Pitfalls
• Promoting Team Well-Being and Efficiency
• Engaging and Education the Board
• Strategies for Effective Pr...

Cyber as precursor to kinetic warfare?  What about cyber AS warfare?  And social media infiltration and propaganda?  Join Allan and Drew as they invite Dave Schroeder, a renowned expert in this field, to discuss the active use of cybersecurity and social media as warfare between the Western World and China, Iraq, Russia and North Korea.  They cover:

• Insertion of fake IT employees into key companies
• Political influence operation...

Howdy, y’all, and welcome to The Cyber Ranch Podcast!  Our guest today is Tim Brown.  If you don’t’ know who Tim Brown is, he is the CISO at SolarWinds, and as such, is one of us.

Or maybe in a way, he is all of us, really.  Tim advises and has held various other roles in the past, including product roles, which our listeners know are well-respected skills down at the 'Ranch.

The topic today is cyber regulation.  It can range from ...

What can we established cybersecurity practitioners ACTUALLY do to help those new in the field besides blathering back and forth about the problem in the echo chamber that is LinkedIn?

Drew got the clever idea of inviting three folks who are brand new to the field or barely started on their cyber journey, and, get this: ASKING them what they're experiencing and what they need! Clever, huh? It's an eye-opening show for a CISO.

We ar...

Howdy, y’all!  Our guest today is Wade Baker, cybersecurity researcher, entrepreneur, professor…  Wade is a Board of Directors member of the FAIR Institute, was an Advisory Board Member at the RSA Conference, was VP of Strategy & Risk Analytics at ThreatConnect, and is now Co-Founder of Cyentia Institute, which aims to advance cybersecurity knowledge and practice through data-driven research.  Wade joins Drew and Allan to talk ...

Howdy, y’all, and welcome to The Cyber Ranch Podcast!  Our guest is Michael Santarcangelo, Founder and President at Security Catalyst.  He’s a former podcaster – co-creator of Business Security Weekly, he even did a stint on Down the Security Rabbit Hole with Raf and James.  True fact, hearing Santa (as his friends call him) and Paul Asadoorian on Business Security Weekly is what inspired Allan to become a podcaster in the first pl...

Your organization runs on commercial software far more than it does open source.  But all you are delivered is binaries.  What is your technical control to ensure that you are safe from this software?

Such software is composed of:

• Open source libraries
• Proprietary code
• 3rd-party proprietary libraries

You need to be able to see it, understand it, probe it for malware, backdoors, corruption, CVEs, KEVs, etc.  Well now you c...

This is our third and final episode of this miniseries.  In this episode we are joined by Ross Young, a well-established member of the cybersecurity community with a storied background and penchant for giving back via various means.  Ross joins Allan and Drew in exploring the role of technology in the People, Process and Technology triad.

Questions covered:

• The traditional triad of people, process, technology has been with us s...

Howdy, y'all!  In part two of our three-part miniseries, we tackle Process with Malcolm Harkins.  Malcolm is former CISO at Intel, a good friend of Allan's, former Cylance Chief Trust and Security Officer, member of the board of director over at TrustMAPP (where Allan used to be COO), and is now at Hidden Layer, working to secure AI.  Hidden Layer did not sponsor this show.

Allan, Drew and Malcolm discuss the following:

1. People,...