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Chapter 1: What is the significance of permission creep at machine speed?
What I love about cybersecurity.
Go. I love winning. I love it when we manage to stop something, stop a hack, or really, really annoy somebody on a server who's trying to take over a system. I just love winning.
It's time to begin the CISO Series podcast. Welcome to the CISO Series podcast. My name is David Spark. I'm the producer of the CISO Series, and joining me as my co-host, it's Andy Ellis, the principal over at DUHA. Andy, say hello to the audience.
Good afternoon, folks, or depending on when you are in the world, good morning, good evening, or good night.
We are available at CISOseries.com, where you can find lots of our other wonderful programming. We have four other shows on our network. Why not explore and listen to some other wonderful programming?
Because this is the best program.
At this very moment, while people are listening, this is exactly what they should be listening to. Nothing else.
Yeah, only when you're done can you go listen to the other ones.
Our sponsor for today's episode, a phenomenal supporter of the CISO series. We adore them. They adore us. It's a mutual love and appreciation for each other. It is ThreatLocker. Meet the world's leading zero-trust platform. Allow what you need. Block everything else by default, including ransomware and rogue code. That is Threadlocker.
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Chapter 2: How do we differentiate between authorization and appropriateness?
Agents will take all of the permissions they have and go use them. The human challenge is humans don't use most of their permissions because we give people way too broad permissions because we don't understand what people do. The core of the problem is we don't actually govern humans. identity or authorization, however you want to look at that.
What we do is we sort of say, oh, like Danny has just come into the organization. Let's just clone somebody else's permissions and give them to Danny. Nobody actually knows what Danny's job's going to do. He changes from one organization to another. So we leave all of his old permissions there while he goes over in case he gets called.
And over the course of 15 years at a company, Danny ends up with access to everything, but he's never using it. Then Danny goes and deploys an agent and the agent's like, oh, I have access to these things. And I could probably use that in answering some question. So I'm going to grab access to everything.
And that's just a key piece of it, which is the thing we've never solved, which is governance over what people do, because we don't know what they do. Authorization and permissioning is just the shadow reflection of what the business needs the person to do, but we don't understand that. So instead we treat it like a ground truth. We give it lots and then agents just abuse it.
So this is not me saying this problem isn't worse. This is me saying this has always actually been the worst problem we have. Now it's just gotten even worse.
So, Danny, part of the core philosophy of ThreatLocker is this default-deny approach. And by default, you limit privileges, yes, or just limit a lot of things beyond just privileges.
So I think it's really about allowing what you need and nothing else. And humans, obviously, they tend to collect privileges over time. You're right. And one of the things we often do is look at those and say, here is a privilege that hasn't been used for three years. This shouldn't be here anymore because it's not currently being used.
The problem with agents is not that they're more or less predictable. The problem with agents is they're much, much faster at causing chaos. And a human, if they start stealing data or uploading data to the internet, they tend to do it quite slowly. If they decide they're going to delete something, they tend to do it quite slowly.
And you have some kind of chance of detecting it before it becomes bad. Agents do it very, very quickly and sometimes very wrongly.
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Chapter 3: What challenges arise with agentic workflows versus human identities?
I always stress that I like it when people disagree with Andy, but I make Andy answer first so you can agree or disagree. This one's an interesting one, Andy. We haven't had one like this before, I don't think. So get ready. Ooh. Comes from Kerry Johnson of Fishbusters. And here's the scenario. Two scenarios, I'm sorry. You have metrics that show improvement, but you cannot prove why.
So it's showing something's good, but you have no clue how it happened. Or you have metrics that show no improvement, but you know you have had improvement. Which one's worse?
Okay. So this one is funny because it feeds into one of my favorite conversations, which is that most metrics that are in use, especially in the security profession are perverse metrics. They don't actually show you what you think they show you. Okay. Um, and I give like
I think one of my favorite examples is like the average time to patch vulnerabilities, which often has some weird denominator in it. Like, is it the ones that were closed or is it the ones that are currently open or closed in the period?
And in fact, if you go look at a bunch of talks I've done, this is one of the examples, like when I say how to build a security program is make sure your metrics survive against perversity. And I don't mean perversion, just the perversity of the world.
Like, oh, if you find new vulnerabilities, you close them immediately, but you only report once a month, nobody will ever see those vulnerabilities in your metrics. But you're like, oh, but I know we did something good. So the underlying question here that I'm actually have to ask is, are these metrics actually really good high quality metrics or are they not?
And I'm gonna actually go with the, because it's most security programs. We're gonna assume they're good. Oh, see, I would assume they're not good. Well, you're assuming that you're trying to create good metrics. Because one of the situations is you know you got better and the metrics don't show it. Therefore, it's not a good metric.
If you don't understand how the metric got better, more likely than not, it's not a good metric. Like I once bought from a security vendor a tool that sat on the network and detected lateral movement so that we could find things coming in and our IT team. Well, then now we're just blaming the metric and so it doesn't really matter. Yeah, no, I'm totally going to blame the metrics.
I think this is a metrics problem. I think that you are worse off if your metrics tell you you're getting better, but you have no idea how you're getting better because you now are lulled into a sense of false confidence. You didn't actually get better. Your metric just tells you you are.
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Chapter 4: How does speed impact access governance in security?
We use the same handful of applications on the same devices over and over again. Yes, you want to make it possible should someone need to log on to a computer that's not theirs that they can do it. Why? No, no, I disagree right there. Well, hold on, hold on. Let me just throw this out.
What I'm more interested in knowing, and I don't know if you have the stats on this, how often does that happen, Danny? Like, if I have a desktop and a laptop, I almost never use another computer. Like, when you've identified the device and the human using it, how often are they not using that device and that human?
So I think laptops and desktops very, very rarely. I think phones obviously, but again, it's their phone. And their phone gets approved. And we've had this whole conversation internally at ThreatLocker, do we allow personal phones to access? But if we do, they have to be individually approved. Authentication tokens have to be put on them.
They can't just say, oh, I'm going to self-approve any phone I want or give my credentials to an attacker to self-approve a phone. I think the reality is people often think about zero trust is making it difficult for people. But it's much more nuanced than that. Even myself. Like most computers, you have access to everything.
As a CEO, I've got a lot of access, but that doesn't mean every program on my computer has to access everything I access. So it's really, hey, you have access to these financials using Excel. You have access to the CRM using this browser. You have access to your email from one of these devices. User experience shouldn't be negatively impacted by that, but security is exponentially increased.
But just do you have any numbers or any insight into if Andy is associated with this computer, this mobile phone, how often does Andy or just anybody who's not already associated to a device try to use another device? Like, how often does that happen?
I don't have statistics, but insights is probably more relevant. And here's an example on ThreatLocker. We had, prior to ZTCA, we had more successful... logins from rogue devices from attackers than we did from people themselves saying, oh, I want to use my home computer to log into my email.
And that's what's terrifying is that it's more likely that someone logging in from a device that is not authenticated or is not a device issued by the company or approved by the company is a attacker.
So it's a red flag, essentially.
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Chapter 5: What patterns do we see in cybersecurity mistakes with new technologies?
But then also, let me just push back a little bit. Can't you use AI, say, where are the, because this is something that I've used AI, but not in security, is where are the areas that I need to be thinking about to secure this piece of software that I haven't considered? And can't the AI start to answer questions like that?
a current piece of software, yes, but to build a security solution, no, because it has to now go and say, I have, and first of all, it's collecting this from public posts. So you have to basically go and take all of this information, conflicting information, and someone has to make a decision.
And what makes security companies, what makes ThreatLocker so good is not our ability to necessarily build software right first time, but the millions and millions of endpoints and the tens of thousands of customers that have given us feedback and shaped it. What AI can't do is take all that and turn it into, hey, I've come up with a perfect solution.
If you think about the first hundred people that use ThreatLocker, I can promise you it wasn't very smooth. Most of them are still customers, thankfully, but then the thousand people gets a little bit smoother and then the 10,000 people gets even smoother. And that's the same with every single piece of software.
AI is going to give you a very, very crude piece of software that doesn't do a great job that you can then refine. And if you want to get something really quick, then that's great. But you can't build a security solution for your company. You can build the bare bones of a software company, but so can any good developer do that in a weekend.
Andy, when we did the recording during B-Sides, this came up and I asked both Mike Johnson, who's the CISO of Rivian, and Sarah Madden, who's the CISO of Convera, are you dropping solutions by creating an AI solution of your own? And they said, yes. Are you seeing this pattern happening?
Well, so what I think there's a nuance here, which is there are more problems than people can afford to buy solutions for. And there's a lot of solutions that are not good. Let's be very honest. There's a lot of vendors out there who are selling things that might as well have just been vibe coded. And so if you're a CISO today, almost every CISO I know is vibe coding something.
Most of when they talk about what they're building, it's problems that the vendors haven't been solving for them because it's this like small niche problem that's an irritant. And so someone's like, look, I'll just go vibe code a thing to fix that irritant for me. Or I've got a vendor that I hate. And their product doesn't really work.
And I can vibe code something that'll give me like 60% of the functionality basically for free so that I can just get rid of that. That's absolutely happening. What I don't hear anybody saying is I'm going to kick out every single one of my security vendors because I can vibe code at all. That isn't happening.
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Chapter 6: How can security leaders protect infrastructure amid a nascent vendor ecosystem?
Code reviews, like nobody was doing good code review anyway. So like vibe coding is certainly helping. Like you can have model go do code review for you and it's much better than having humans do it.
All right. We have come to the end of our recording, and I want to thank you, Danny, and I'm going to let you have the very last word, and also you, Andy, as well. But I first want to thank your company, then, be ThreatLocker. Remember, if you want to know more about ThreatLocker Zero Trust Network Access and Zero Trust Cloud Access, go check them out at threatlocker.com slash CISO.
Remember, that's slash CISO. Super easy way to let them know that you heard about them from the CISO series.
i know that you're always hiring over there at threat locker still doing that danny yes absolutely just purchased a new building got space for another 800 people here maybe even more that is amazing at the your growth rate i'm quite impressed with it any last words about zero trust network access or zero trust cloud access or anything else you want to say about threat locker danny
Look, I will just say this, and ThreatLocker has a suite of tools that makes your life easier as a C-server, as an IT manager, an IT director to deploy least privilege in your environment, whether call it zero trust, call it whatever you want. But I think the reality is security is difficult, but it doesn't have to be. We don't have to chase our tail. We can put simple controls in place.
We can do basic things and we can change our environment from constantly having to fight malware and alerts to actually just being secure without interfering with users' productivity.
Very, very good point. And it's basic philosophy of Threadlocker and we're very impressed with it. Thank you very much, Danny. Thank you very much, Andy. And thank you to your company, ThreatLocker, for sponsoring us. And to our audience, as I always say, we greatly appreciate your contributions. By the way, send me in more what's worse scenarios. We need lots more.
We greatly appreciate your contributions and for listening to the CISO Series podcast. That wraps up another episode. If you haven't subscribed to the podcast, please do. We have lots more shows on our website, CISOseries.com. Please join us on Fridays for our live shows, Super Cyber Friday, our virtual meetup, and Cyber Security Headlines Week in Review. This show thrives on your input.
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