The Cyber Ranch Podcast

Every trail ride ends at the, well, end of the trail. This is the end of the trail for The Cyber Ranch Podcast. Drew and Allan offer final parting thoughts and conduct brief interviews with 3 folks whose presence was vital to the show:  Chris Cochran, Ron Eddings, and Rich Salim. It's been an amazing journey and we thank ALL of you who ever listened to even just one snippet of one episode. Y'all s...

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...

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 Edg...

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.  Jo...

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 quit...

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...

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, accu...

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...

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 generati...

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,...

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 Bo...

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 companie...

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 cy...

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...

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. ...

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...

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, K...

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...

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...

Thanks for listening, y'all!  Our next show is all about Process (we already did a show on People) and after that comes Technology. Y'all be good now!

Jeremiah Roe has held many roles in cybersecurity:  Field CISO, Red Teamer, Advisor, Consultant, Etc.  He currently advises for OffSec, who provide quality cybersecurity training.  Drew Simonis and Allan Alford determined that Jeremiah would be a great guest for launching a 3-part mini series - each of the three shows exploring People, Process and Technology respectively. The three cover the follo...

Drew and Allan were skeptical about SABSA, as it is a model one CISO friend described as being "only good for a graduate student writing a paper!"  Another CISO pointed out that SABSA was designed long before modern engineering practices. Andrew Townley, a long-term SABSA consultant, on the other hand, gets straight to the practicality of it.  There is indeed an academic and theoretical foundation...

Hang on to your saddle for this one!  Drew Simonis joins Allan as his new co-host in a show where the two of them explore alternative models for selling and funding the cyber mission! You probably know about corporate social responsibility initiatives. Did you know that it's not a a new idea in the history of capitalism, but rather a throwback? Before shareholder capitalism, there was stakeholder...

Howdy, y’all, and welcome to The Cyber Ranch Podcast!  Our guest toda is Tomer Schwartz, co-founder and CTO over at Dazz  Yup!  He’s a vendor!  And OMG he’s a sponsoring vendor too! Whatever will we do?  But wait, y’all know Allan's rule:  Vendors are allowed on the show if and when they can add more value on a given subject vs. any practitioners in The Cyber Ranch network.  Tomer fits that bill p...

If leadership exists in good and bad forms, so must followership. Leadership can exist both by designation, and dynamically, as manifested by folks who may not have an official leader title. And yet we don't measure followership, and our measurements of leadership leave something to be desired... Join Allan Alford as he flies solo this week exploring these topics and suggesting a better way forwar...