Absolute AppSec

Myles is currently Product Lead for Developer Platform at Snowflake. Previously, he directed project management at GitHub, overseeing projects like GitHub Copilot Workspace for PRs, Codespaces, npm, and Packages. A key contributor to Ecma International and TC39, he has served for stretches as a Delegate, Co-Chair, and VP for the project. His contributions to TC39 coincided with his periods he work...

Ken and Seth are back for another episode that starts with a summary of the Semgrep and OpenGrep break. This is followed by Google's recent article titled Secure By Design: Google's Blueprint for a High-Assurance Web Framework. Google is focused on protections within the browser, given their products and business, but the controls and overall process are relevant to most application security progr...

Seth and Ken return for another week to review current articles and happenings in the application security world. Specifically, they spend some time reacting to the news that the Semgrep Community version has been forked as Opengrep by a number of vendors. This occurs as a result of Semgrep changing the licenses on their open source rules to prevent use in competitor products. Also a discussion sp...

Josh Larsen, co-founder of CTO of Ghost Security, joins Seth Law and Ken Johnson on January 28th at 12 Noon Eastern time. Before Ghost Security, Josh was a co-founder and CEO of Darkbit and before that of the Blackfin Security Group. Larsen led the GTM strategy for both startups, and Darkbit and Blackfin Security Group were acquired by Aqua Security and Symantec Corporation, respectively. Ghost Se...

Ken and Seth start with a demo and discussion on some newer tools that use integrated AI in both the code and workflow spaces. Specifically, use for code review and understanding is improving. This is followed by a wide-ranging discussion of false positives, where they come from, and how they affect application security. Seth gets up in arms about trying to deal with unrealistic expectations aroun...

Seth and Ken return once again to talk through the overall effectiveness and purpose of Portswigger's Top 10 Web Hacking Techniques and how it benefits the community. A short discussion on some of the current crop of techniques up for polling. Spurred by recent revelations around Snyk's approach to identifying security issues in npm packages, the duo discusses research techniques and identifying s...

Ken and Seth return for 2025 to review the accuracy of their predictions from 2024 and make a few new ones for this new year. Some hits and misses for last year, but overall the generic predictions for both AI/LLM growth and software supply chain security were accurate. However, they were wrong in their assumptions around LLM creation and training. For 2025, predictions on AI billing models, softw...

The dynamic duo is back for another holiday special. Not that they reference the holidays, but dig into complaints about security conferences and how to build a conference network. Followed by a discussion inspired by a recent TL;DRSec post from Maya Kaczorowski on "What Sucks about Security" where security leaders were asked that specific question. This leads into the question "What Sucks in AppS...

Seth and Ken are happy to announce that Clint Gibler (@clintgibler), the force behind TL;DRSec (tldrsec.com) and head of Security Research at Semgrep, will be coming on as a guest again on the Absolute AppSec podcast. The conversation starts with background on his experience with TL;DRSec and writing a newsletter. Followed up by an indepth discussion on secure defaults and how Semgrep and other to...

Join us for an episode of Absolute AppSec with Kinnaird McQuade, founder and CTO of NightVision. Kinnaird developed NightVision as a security testing tool that combines codebase analysis with DAST features. Before NightVision, Kinnaird worked as lead security engineer at both Square and Salesforce. Additionally he worked at Synopsys as Cloud Security Consulting Practice Lead. Be sure to tune into...

Seth (@sethlaw) and Ken (@cktricky) return for an in-depth discussion on penetration testing expectations, driven by recent posts and slack activity from Andrew Wilson. Essentially, certain clients expect that a single penetration test finds everything possible, whether or not those expectations are appropriate. The duo expounds on their experience with similar expectations and how its affected th...

Scott Norberg joins Ken Johnson and Seth Law for an episode of Absolute AppSec all about SAST. Scott is an ASP.NET Security Consultant, Author, Researcher and Speaker. In addition to running his Opperis Technologies consultancy, Scott has recently begun working as lead application security architect at CDW. Before that he worked as Lead Application Security engineer at Gallagher and was a Senior C...

Jeremy Long (@ctxt on social media), Principal Security Engineer at Service Now and project founder and lead for the OWASP Dependency Check project joins Ken Johnson (@cktricky) and Seth Law (@sethlaw). Jeremy spent a decade and a half as a lead application security engineer and principal engineer at Wells Fargo before joining ServiceNow. He has spent years developing processes for automated secur...

Ken and Seth return for Episode #263 and start with a discussion around web application fuzzing and the deficiencies of vulnerability and exploit-focused dynamic testing, a common thread in Seth's ranting. This is followed by a discussion on mobile testing and attempting to control security through client-side controls, spurred by an article that compares security in the McDonald's Android app to...

Ariel Shin joins Ken Johnson (@cktricky on social media) and Seth Law (@sethlaw) for a special episode of Absolute AppSec. Ariel is currently a Security Engineering Manager at Datadog after a three-year stint at Twilio where she worked as an engineering manager in product security, a product security team lead, and a senior product security engineer. This year at Bsides SF 2024, she presented on h...

Ken (@cktricky) and Seth (@sethlaw) are back to review this weeks news and commiserate about industry happenings. First up are their thoughts on the current economic climate and how it has affected the security industry over the last 5 years. This is followed with evolving nature of password reset requirements as frequent changes are not recommended by NIST. The duo digs into possible motives for...

Absolute AppSec welcomes Darren Meyer (@DarrenPMeyer on infosec.exchange and X platform) from Endor Labs as a guest on the show to discuss Endor Lab’s newly released 2024 Dependency Management Report. Implementation of reachability analysis as a sine qua non of effective dependency management is one of the top-line takeaways from the newly released report. The discussion dives deeper with Darren d...

Seth and Ken take the podcast global this week while traveling to Melbourne, Australia. The duo is joined this episode are joined by Paul McCarty and Daniel Ting, both involved in the local application security community. The discussion starts with a comparison of industries in Australia and the United States, both differences and similarities. This is followed by thoughts on security software sup...

Seth (@sethlaw) and Ken (@cktricky) are back this week with some hot takes on the recent cancellation of OWASP's San Francisco Developer Days that were running alongside Global AppSec San Francisco. OWASP has struggled to engage the development community over the years and this is no surprise for anyone in AppSec/ProdSec. This is followed by review of the ALBeast (why do all vulnerabilities have t...

Ken (@cktricky) returns alongside Seth (@sethlaw) for the week. This starts with an in-depth discussion on the pros and cons of in-person and virtual trainings. In short, the duo prefers in-person due for the advantages, but understand that financial pressures come into play, so virtual is a good substitute. This is followed by thoughts on the recent lawsuit by thy government against Georgia Tech...

Seth and Ken are back from Vegas for Episode 0xFF (!!!!) of Absolute AppSec, sponsored by Redpoint Security (redpointsecurity.com). After spending the last week+ withering away in the desert heat while listening to industry insiders, technicians, and hackers talk about their research, the duo have returned dehydrated to share their own experiences from DEF CON 32, Blackhat, BSidesLV, and Diana Ini...

Seth and Ken return this week at a slightly unusual time help get you prepped for all things Hacker Summer Camp. As regular visitors to Las Vegas each year for Blackhat, BSidesLV, DEF CON, and other events, the duo has recommendations for making the most of your time in the desert. Specifically, download HackerTracker (https://hackertracker.app), plan out your time, take care of yourself, and have...

We'd only been a dozen episodes old the last time Justin Collins (@presidentbeef) was on Absolute AppSec, so his upcoming return is certainly overdue. Justin is currently head of security at Gusto, an organization he's been helping secure for nearly five years now. Before Gusto, Justin had stints at SurveyMonkey, Twitter, AT&T interactive, among others. He also is the lead developer of the open-so...

Product Security and Cloud security guru Rami McCarthy (@ramimacisabird on X) comes on the Absolute AppSec podcast with Ken and Seth (@cktricky and @sethlaw)! To get to know Rami, you should first check out his website here to get acquainted with some of his latest prodigious activities: https://ramimac.me/. He’s recently delivered a talk regarding zero-touch prod at Fwd:CloudSec and finished a st...

Seth and Ken are back with Episode 251, continuing on with their ranting over all things application security. This starts with a discussion of Mozilla's HTTP Observatory that scans sites for security-relevant headers and leads to a discussion of so-called "passive" scanning of internet sets for risk analysis purposes. This is followed by a walkthrough of the recent exploit of Chrome extensions fo...