Cloud Security Podcast by Google

Guest: Vishwas Manral , CEO at Precize.ai Topic: Why is agent security so different from "just" LLM security? Why now? Agents are coming, sure, but they are - to put it mildly - not in wide use. Why create a top 10 list now and not wait for people to make the mistakes? It sounds like "agents + IAM" is a disaster waiting to happen. What should be our approach for solving this? Do we have one? Which...

Guest: Elie Burstein ,  Distinguished Scientist, Google Deepmind Topics:   What is Sec-Gemini, why are we building it? How does DeepMind decide when to create something like Sec-Gemini?  What motivates a decision to focus on something like this vs anything else we might build as a dedicated set of regular Gemini capabilities?  What is Sec-Gemini good at? How do we know it's good at those things? ...

Guest: Royal Hansen , VP of Engineering at Google, former CISO of Alphabet Topics: The "God-Like Designer" Fallacy: You've argued that we need to move away from the "God-like designer" model of security—where we pre-calculate every risk like building a bridge—and towards a biological model. Can you explain why that old engineering mindset is becoming risky in today's cloud and AI environments? Res...

Guest: Chris Sistrunk , Technical Leader, OT Consulting, Mandiant Topics: When we hear "attacks on Operational Technology (OT)" some think of Stuxnet targeting PLCs or even backdoored pipeline control software plot in the 1980s. Is this space always so spectacular or are there less "kaboom" style attacks we are more concerned about in practice? Given the old "air-gapped" mindset of many OT environ...

Guest: Bruce Schneier Topics: Do you believe that AI is going to end up being a net improvement for defenders or attackers?  Is short term vs long term different? We're excited about the new book you have coming out with your co-author Nathan Sanders "Rewiring Democracy" .  We want to ask the same question, but for society: do you think AI is going to end up helping the forces of liberal democracy...

Guest: Heather Adkins , VP of Security Engineering, Google Topic: The term "AI Hacking Singularity" sounds like pure sci-fi, yet you and some other very credible folks are using it to describe an imminent threat. How much of this is hyperbole to shock the complacent, and how much is based on actual, observed capabilities today?  Can autonomous AI agents really achieve that "exploit - at - machine...

Guest: Caleb Hoch , Consulting Manager on Security Transformation Team, Mandiant, Google Cloud Topics: How has vulnerability management (VM) evolved beyond basic scanning and reporting, and what are the biggest gaps between modern practices and what organizations are actually doing? Why are so many organizations stuck with 1990s VM practices? Why mitigation planning is still hard for so many? Why...

Guests: Sivanesh Ashok , bug bounty hunter Sreeram KL, bug bounty hunter Topics: We hear from the Cloud VRP team that you write excellent bugbounty reports - is there any advice you'd give to other researchers when they write reports? You are one of Cloud VRP's top researchers and won the MVH (most valuable hacker) award at their event in June - what do you think makes you so successful at finding...

Guests: Alexander Pabst , Deputy Group CISO, Allianz Lars Koenig ,  Global Head of D&R, Allianz   Topics:   Moving from traditional SIEM to an agentic SOC model, especially in a heavily regulated insurer, is a massive undertaking. What did the collaboration model with your vendor look like?  Agentic AI introduces a new layer of risk - that of unconstrained or unintended autonomous action. In the c...

Guest: Ari Herbert-Voss , CEO at RunSybil Topics: The market already has Breach and Attack Simulation (BAS), for testing known TTPs. You're calling this 'AI-powered' red teaming. Is this just a fancy LLM stringing together known attacks, or is there a genuine agent here that can discover a truly novel attack path that a human hasn't scripted for it? Let's talk about the 'so what?' problem. Pentest...

Guest: Balazs Scheidler , CEO at Axoflow , original founder of syslog-ng Topics: Are we really coming  to "access to security data" and away from "centralizing the data"? How to detect without the same storage for all logs? Is data pipeline a part of SIEM or is it standalone? Will this just collapse into SIEM soon? Tell us about the issues with log pipelines in the past? What about enrichment? Why...

Guest: Monzy Merza , co-founder and CEO at Crogl Topics: We often hear about the aspirational idea of an "IronMan suit" for the SOC—a system that empowers analysts to be faster and more effective. What does this ideal future of security operations look like from your perspective, and what are the primary obstacles preventing SOCs from achieving it today? You've also raised a metaphor of AI in the...

Guest: Jibran Ilyas , Director for Incident Response at Google Cloud Topics: What is this tabletop thing, please tell us about running a good security incident tabletop?  Why are tabletops for incident response preparedness so amazingly effective yet rarely done well? This is cheap/easy/useful so why do so many fail to do it? Why are tabletops seen as kind of like elite pursuit? What's your favori...

Guest:  David Gee , Board Risk Advisor, Non-Executive Director & Author, former CISO Topics: Drawing from the "Aspiring CIO and CISO" book's focus on continuous improvement, how have you seen the necessary skills, knowledge, experience, and behaviors for a CISO evolve, especially when guiding an organization through a transformation? Could you share lessons learned about leadership and organizatio...

Guest: Sumedh Thakar , President and CEO, Qualys Topics: How did vulnerability management (VM) change since Qualys was founded in 1999? What is different about VM today? Can we actually remediate vulnerabilities automatically at scale? Why did this work for you even though many expected it would not? Where does cloud fit into modern vulnerability management? How does AI help vulnerability manageme...

Guest: Rick Caccia , CEO and Co-Founder, Witness AI Topics: In what ways is the current wave of enterprise AI adoption different from previous technology shifts? If we say "but it is different this time", then why? What is your take on "consumer grade AI for business" vs enterprise AI? A lot of this sounds a bit like the CASB era circa 2014. How is this different with AI?  The concept of "routing...

Guest: Jon Oltsik , security researcher, ex-ESG analyst Topics: You invented the concept of SOAPA – Security Operations & Analytics Platform Architecture. As we look towards SOAPA 2025, how do you see the ongoing debate between consolidating security around a single platform versus a more disaggregated, best-of-breed approach playing out?  What are the key drivers for either strategy in today's co...

Guest: Cy Khormaee , CEO, AegisAI Ryan Luo , CTO, AegisAI Topics: What is the state of email security in 2025? Why start an email security company now? Is it true that there are new and accelerating AI threats to email? It sounds cliche, but do you really have to use good AI to fight bad AI? What did you learn from your time fighting abuse at scale at Google that is helping you now How do you see...

Guest: Augusto Barros , Principal Product Manager, Prophet Security , ex-Gartner analyst Topics: What is your definition of "AI SOC"? What will AI change in a SOC? What will the post-AI SOC look like?  What are the primary mechanisms by which AI SOC tools reduce attacker dwell time, and what challenges do they face in maintaining signal fidelity? Why would this wave of SOC automation (namely, AI S...

Guest: Rick Correa ,Uber TL Google SecOps, Google Cloud Topics: On the 3rd anniversary of Curated Detections, you've grown from 70 rules to over 4700. Can you walk us through that journey? What were some of the key inflection points and what have been the biggest lessons learned in scaling a detection portfolio so massively? Historically the SecOps Curated Detection content was opaque, which led t...

Guest: Errol Weiss , Chief Security Officer (CSO) at Health-ISAC Topics: How adding digital resilience is crucial for enterprises? How to make the leaders shift from "just cybersecurity"  to "digital resilience"? How to be the most resilient you can be given the resources? How to be the most resilient with the least amount of money? How to make yourself a smaller target? Smaller target measures fi...

Guest: Craig H. Rowland , Founder and CEO, Sandfly Security Topics: When it comes to Linux environments – spanning on-prem, cloud, and even–gasp–hybrid setups – where are you seeing the most significant blind spots for security teams today?  There's sometimes a perception that Linux is inherently more secure or less of a malware target than Windows. Could you break down some of the fundamental dif...

Guest: Dominik Swierad ,  Senior PM D&R AI and Sec-Gemini Topics: When introducing AI agents to security teams at Google, what was your initial strategy to build trust and overcome the natural skepticism? Can you walk us through the very first conversations and the key concerns that were raised? With a vast array of applications, how did you identify and prioritize the initial use cases for AI age...

Guest: Kim Albarella , Global Head of Security, TikTok Questions: Security is part of your DNA. In your day to day at TikTok, what are some tips you'd share with users about staying safe online? Many regulations were written with older technologies in mind. How do you bridge the gap between these legacy requirements and the realities of a modern, microservices-based tech stack like TikTok's, ensur...

Guest: Manija Poulatova , Director of Security Engineering and Operations at Lloyd's Banking Group Topics: SIEM migration is hard, and it can take ages. Yours was - given the scale and the industry - on a relatively short side of 9 months. What's been your experience so far with that and what could have gone faster?  Anton might be a "reformed" analyst but I can't resist asking a three legged stoo...