The Cyber Ranch Podcast

In this episode, Allan interviews Greg Rogers, CISO at Legal & General America, about migrating legacy, monolithic, internally facing, manually tested, waterfall applications to Cloud, CI/CD with automation, customer-facing applications, all with modern development languages and environments. Greg migrated just about everything legacy to just about everything modern across a series of monolithic a...

In this episode, Allan's friend Dr. Sam Small, CISO of Zero Fox, joins us to chat about credential stuffing, its implications and the defenses against it. Several statistics are given from a few industry reports on credential stuffing, including the Verizon DBIR and F5's report. Several techniques to foil credential stuffing are explored, as well as common traps when combatting credential stuffing...

On today’s episode with Allan, we talk “Ugly Exits” with Naomi Buckwalter, Director of Information Security. Of course, to start the episode, Naomi answers Allan’s question of how she got started in cyber. They circle back to the topic at hand, “Ugly Exits”. Under this umbrella are: being fired, laid off, "burning bridges", or being encouraged to leave in a "voluntary" manner. Allan shares statist...

On today’s episode with Allan, we have Tim Rohrbaugh, CISO at JetBlue, here to talk about Agile methodology and how it can be applied to an entire security program. Tim got into cyber through the military. From the military he went into consulting and ended up at JetBlue. At JetBlue that he is always trying to find ways to invest dollars in security programs to balance what is going on. Along with...

With us today is Christina Richmond program Vice President at IDC. She's an industry analyst, and she's here to talk to us all about the analyst lifestyle. Allan starts the episode asking Christina to share all about how she got into cyber and what her day job is like. Christina actually began by working in the storage space, and discovered security. To her it was like a drug. What does she do thr...

With us today is Derly Gutierrez, Head of Security at 1010 Data, and veteran. Derly is here with us today to talk about the journey to passwordless authentication and the flaws and strenghts of today's authentication methoods. Allan and Derly refer to studies and surveys about the problems with passwords and the challenges of implementing passwordless approaches. Derly emphasizes the need for othe...

With us today is Taylor Lehmann, former ciso several times over in the healthcare sector, and currently Americas leader for security, networking, identity, and compliance solution architecture at AWS. Taylor and Allan talk about application security: why it's important, who are the personas, the value of threat modeling, infrastructure as code, how to get started, and relationships with developers...

With us today is Ian Thornton-Trump, Chief Information Security Officer at Cyjax and an ITIL-certified IT professional with 25 years of experience in IT security and information technology. Ian shares his background which started back in the Canadian military. During those times, "IT" was called "automated data processing", and it is quite clear how far this has advanced. He joined the Royal Canad...

With us today is Drew Brown, IT Security Manager at the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Drew is here to talk about FAIR and his real-world usage of it and testing it in the trenches. Drew shares a little bit about his background in cyber, and a little bit about his day job. He spent 15 years in IT. That opened the door then for him to be the CISO for one of the state agencies. Now his title is IT Se...

With us today is Andy Ellis, operating partner at YL Ventures, former Akamai CSO and newly inducted member of the CSO Hall of Fame. We're here to talk about nonstandard hiring practices and how Andy has built an amazing team using nonstandard approaches. Andy began his career in cyber ("I remember back then, you know, we didn't call it cyber, but I think we've all given up and, and that's now the...

Today we talk with Richard Seiersen, co-author of “How to Measure Anything in Cybersecurity Risk”. Richard shared that at his first CISO position, he was challenged with addressing prioritization of risk, which led to his authoring a book with Doug Hubbard. What can cyber learn from older risk disciplines? The life table used broadly to measure time-to-event data goes back 500 years. Businesses ke...

With us today, is a very special guest, Accidental CISO, of Twitter fame. His anonymity on Twitter, allows him to be a little more “truthy” about the CISO game than a lot of us can afford to be on social media. We have distorted his voice a bit to protect that anonymity. “Accidental” shares how he got into cyber, and that is a culmination of being in a career where he had to fill “all” the hats. H...

Today we talk with Marlys Rodgers, who has been in cyber for over 20 years. She currently is CISO for CSAA Insurance Group and is running security for the company as well as running governance risk and compliance for technology. She shares that it feels like she is constantly balancing assessing with preventing. Allan brings up breach and attack simulation (BAS), and when it is most appropriate to...

With us today is John Petrie, Counselor to the NTT Global CISO. He is responsible for managing the growing internal security challenges for the NTT operating companies across the globe. Retired in 1996 from the Marines John began his career in multiple security positions. He shares that his major responsibility of today is creating the enterprise security architecture (“ESA”) for NTT. Allan used t...

With us today are Lynn Dohm, Executive Director of Women in Cybersecurty (WiCyS) and Martha Laughman, Veterans Iniative Lead at WiCyS and Director of Workforce Development at Smoothstack. Lynn and Martha are here to talk about the amazing programs for women and women veterans at WiCyS. WiCyS is so much more than a conference for women in cybersecurity. Its presence spans the globe and its programs...

Howdy, y’all, and welcome to The Cyber Ranch Podcast! With us today is Patrick Benoit, Global Head of Cyber GRC, and BISO at CBRE. Patrick is here to talk about Data Risk Governance, a slightly new twist on an old problem. Like our host, Patrick is also from the Dallas-Fort Worth area of Texas. To start the conversation, Allan asks Patrick to share a little about himself, his background in informa...

Welcome to The Cyber Ranch Podcast, recorded under the big blue skies of Texas, where one CISO explores the cybersecurity landscape with the help of friends and experts! Today, host and CISO Allan Alford interviews Mike Manrod, CISO at Grand Canyon Education. Mike has done quite a bit of research on vishing, smishing and the upcoming STIR/SHAKEN legislation meant to combat those two. To start the...

Welcome to The Cyber Ranch Podcast, recorded under the big blue skies of Texas, where one CISO explores the cybersecurity landscape with the help of friends and experts! Today, host and CISO Allan Alford interviews Gabe Lawerence, General Manager of Cyber Security Protection at Toyota Motor North America. Gabe has seen the good and bad of purple teaming, and we’re here today to discuss what a matu...

In this episode, host and CISO Allan Alford interviews his friend Dutch Schwartz, Principal Security Specialist at Amazon Web Services. Dutch is a vendor, but do not press 'stop' just yet! Dutch is an empathetic outsider, an observor, and a constant learner and researcher. He brings some unique insights to our practice. Dutch talks about his encounters with CISOs and their direc staffs, and opines...

In this episode, host and CISO Allan Alford interviews his friend Chris Foulon, Sr. Manager of Cybersecurity at a leading fintech compnay, and co-host of the "Breaking into Cybersecurity" podcast. Chris has 15 years in information security, having started at the helpdesk years ago. His biggest desire in infosec is helping others. In his day job Chris gets to work with every part of the business. O...

Today, host and CISO Allan Alford interviews friend and fellow CISO Gary Hayslip. Besides being a brilliant business leader, Gary is an author, mentor, and one of the best all-around humans Allan knows! To start the conversation, Allan asks Gary to share about himself and his background in cybersecurity. While he had a natural interest in computers and technology more generally, Gary’s formal entr...

In this show, host Allan Alford interviews Dr. Rebecca Wynn about information security decisions made during COVID and what the 2021 "reckoning" might look like. Dr. Wynn is a well-recognized CISO and Chief Privacy Officer, who faced some large-scale challenges during 2020. Allan welcomes Dr. Wynn to the cyber ranch! The show starts with Allan asking Dr. Wynn to introduce herself and to tell the l...

In this show, host Allan Alford interviews his friend Chris Castaldo about how to align information security with the business. Chris is the CISO at Crossbeam, and is also the author of the book "Start-Up Secure: Baking Cybersecurity into Your Company from Founding to Exit", available for pre-order at Amazon. Chris, like Allan, views himself as a very business-oriented CISO. Allan welcomes Chris d...

Today, host and CISO Allan Alford interviews Omkhar Arasaratnam, a veteran of the cybersecurity industry, on the topic of supply chain security. With a career in security going all the way back to 2004, and with experience working for IBM and several financial institutions before becoming an Engineering Director at Google, Omkhar brings much hard-earned insight to the table! Looking to tap into th...

In this show, host Allan Alford interviews his friend Will Lin about startups and venture capital. Will Lin is a venture capitalist with ForgePoint Capital, focusing exclusively on the information security space. First and foremost, Will views his current role as a way to help others. Allan welcomes Will on to the show to help his listeners learn more about the startup world, the venture capital w...