Category: Cyber Security

On Episode 38 of The Cyber Security Matters Podcast, we discussed changes to AI governance with Patrick Sullivan, the VP of Strategy and Innovation at A-Lign. He shared his insights on changing legislation and what that means for organisations that use AI as part of their workflow, as well as his definition of ‘AI governance’. Here’s what he said:

What does the term ‘AI governance’ actually mean? 

ISACA through COBIT has introduced control objectives for AI and has defined governance as a value-creation process. When we think about governance, we think about value creation. COBIT says that governance is creating desired outcomes at an optimized risk and cost. So for us, we need to ask ‘What do we want to create? What risk are we willing to bear? And what budget do we have to support all these things?’ Our practices are processes that are employed to ensure that we’re creating the outcomes that we want as an organization in both a risk-appropriate and resource-appropriate way. 

What frameworks or guidelines can organizations adopt to ensure AI systems are used responsibly and ethically, and does this vary based on the size of the organisation? 

Generally, we won’t see the applicable frameworks vary based on organizational size. In the market today, there are two frameworks that most organizations are using to build their AI governance systems to adhere to X number of regulations. For neuco as an example, we saw that the EU AI Act was written into the Official Journal last week. These regulations are pressing, which means many organizations that are bound to the AI Act now need to take significant action to prepare themselves. 

How do those frameworks and guidelines actually physically enhance trust within the supply chain?

ISO 42001 is a certifiable standard and management system. Organisations that implement ISO 42001 as their AI management system can have a third-party auditor certification body, of which A-lign is one, independently validate that appropriate processes are in place, that appropriate procedures and commitments have been made, and that the management system is running effectively to meet the intent of the standard. So there’s a certification mechanism that organisations can use to offer assurance to others in their supply chain and their value chain. 

Many in the security space are already very familiar with security questionnaires. We’re currently seeing a lot of pressure on organisations to answer AI questions because the market is really educating itself about what’s important. That is then driving the need to respond to those questions or unknowns to or from suppliers. While regulation will always be a pressing concern, self-policing in the market is where I see us go with responsible AI use.

How do you expect AI governance and compliance to change in the coming years?

Over the next five years, I think we’ll see the skills gap become more pronounced. I don’t know that there’s necessarily the awareness that there needs to be. We’re seeing groups come online like a group called the International Association for Algorithmic Auditors, which helps new algorithmic auditors or AI auditors understand what skills they need to be successful, and I think we’ll see more organisations like that come online as the recognition of the AI governance and AI assessment skills gap becomes more pronounced. As that happens, the market will really largely start self-policing, and we’ll enter the hype cycle. But, once that begins to simmer down, AI governance will become more of an operational process just like any other governance, risk governance, or vulnerability management process. 

To hear more from Patrick, tune into Episode 38 of The Cyber Security Matters Podcast here. 

We sit down regularly with some of the biggest names in our industry, we dedicate our podcast to the stories of leaders in the technologies industries that bring us closer together. Follow the link here to see some of our latest episodes and don’t forget to subscribe.     

Matthew Chiodi, the Chief Trust Officer at Cerby, joined us on Episode 37 of The Cyber Security Matters Podcast to share his insights into the industry. One of the topics that stood out to us was the best practices that he shared from Cerby’s work on securing cloud-native applications. Here are the highlights of his answers: 

“When people say cloud-native application, that refers to applications that are built cloud-first. If you have a VM that’s running on-prem and you move it to run in the cloud, that’s not cloud-native – that’s just cloud transferring. Quite frankly, it’s a waste of time and money to do that. Cloud-native means that your infrastructure was not built manually, but it was built using infrastructure as code templates, defining what your infrastructure would look like in code first. Then you’re using code to bring up things like lambda functions that only work during a certain period of execution. That doesn’t use a typical VM, it’s usually a microservices-based architecture. 

When it comes to cyber security, the basics still apply. Organisations have a massive data sprawl issue in the cloud because it’s so easy to upload to. If you go back 5+ years ago, if you needed a new data store, you had to open a ticket with your IT department and wait 2-3 weeks or even months, depending on the size of the organisation, before you got access to it. Data also tended to be much more centralised, and there were checks and balances. For a lot of cloud environments, that’s not a problem anymore. Developers generally have a fairly high level of access to create new services and they can create new data stores on demand by calling APIs, so you tend to get data in all different places. 

You have to know where your data is and what it is because if you don’t, sensitive data, like personally identifiable information, can easily end up in the wrong place. Health information that was intended to only be in a production environment can very easily be moved to lower environments that don’t have the same level of governance. I’d advise having a good tool that can tell you what you have and who has access to it. 

Knowing your code – specifically your application security code – is still highly important because you might know where your data is, and who has access to it, but if you’re writing crappy code, you’re introducing a vulnerability to your digital environment. So, you have to know who has access to your data and your code. If I get access to your data, I can do what I want with it. Or, if I get access to your code, I can inject things into your code that will then give me access to your data. 

In terms of what Cerby does; I usually say that in all organisations, you have two different types of applications. A lot of times we think of cloud apps versus on-prem apps, and that’s true, but really it comes down to identity and access management. You have standard apps that you can very easily integrate with your identity provider, and your IT team can manage them centrally in terms of who should have access through that type of identity provider. The other category is what we call non-standard applications or disconnected applications. This is a massive problem space because the apps that fall into the nonstandard category can’t be managed with your central identity systems. Cerby is focused on that non-standard space. 

We connect those non-standard applications back into identity platforms on trial ID. We did a little bit of research last year, and what we really wanted to understand was the scope and scale of the problem, and we found that organisations have a median of about 175 of these non-standard apps. We’ve spoken to some large healthcare companies who have 1000s of these, and we know there are hard costs associated with these applications because if you as an IT admin in one of these organisations have an employee who needs access to one of these non-standard apps, they can’t go through any kind of automated process – they can’t go into your access request system, they’re going to put a ticket in. Once you get to it, you have to manually log into this app, figure out what access they need, etc. and it’s all a lot of hassle. We make it so that you can centrally manage these non-standard disconnected apps, using your existing native tools.

To find out more about securing cloud-based applications, tune into Episode 37 of The Cyber Security Matters Podcast here. 

We sit down regularly with some of the biggest names in our industry, we dedicate our podcast to the stories of leaders in the technologies industries that bring us closer together. Follow the link here to see some of our latest episodes and don’t forget to subscribe.     

As the Cyber Security industry expands, growing your team has become more difficult than ever. On Episode 36 of The Cyber Security Matters Podcast we spoke with Julia Doronina, the Co-founder and CMO at G-71 Security, about the challenges she’s faced when it comes to scaling her team. Julia is also a passionate advocate and mentor for women in tech, giving her some valuable insights into diversifying the sector’s talent pool and making it more accessible. 

What are the key talent topics that need addressing the most?

I believe that it’s important to focus on employee development and to provide opportunities for career growth. With the rise of artificial intelligence, there are many new solutions and projects on the market, so companies and executive teams need to encourage their employees to learn new things and understand these new approaches because they can help optimise processes. The main thing is to support your employees and help them to grow themselves.

Do you struggle to hire based on talent shortages?

We’re a startup and we don’t have a big team right now. We were dealing with different outsourced people who can help us with different activities, like design, copywriting, analysis, and so on. I think that it’s very important when you’re talking with people who you want to attract to your company, to talk to them about the use cases for their skills, not just their CV, to understand how they think and how they can implement their skills into your business. Figure out how they can expand your current situation or activities. 

Early in my career, my skill set was straightforward. I knew the general and traditional channels, and I implemented them. Now I’m trying to use AI. I use Chat GPT, about 20, 30 or even 40 times per day for different tasks because it can help me optimise my processes. My worldview and approach to problem-solving are changing as the world evolves, and I think that we need to encourage people to develop themselves in the same way.

There’s a lack of diversity at a grassroots level, so what can we do to address this?

We need to create an inclusive culture in companies, even in startups. We need to include different inclusivity training and actively attract candidates from diverse demographic groups because they have a lot of insights and skills. It can be great to create programmes to support the development of underrepresented people. It’s important for companies to actively support these initiatives, mostly from the executive point of view, because they are the drivers of the company, so they need to support it.

To hear more from Julia, tune into Episode 36 of The Cyber Security Matters Podcast here.

We sit down regularly with some of the biggest names in our industry, we dedicate our podcast to the stories of leaders in the technologies industries that bring us closer together. Follow the link here to see some of our latest episodes and don’t forget to subscribe.     

Cyber Security is a growing sector, with plenty of startups evolving in the space to meet the need for unique solutions. On Episode 35 of The Cyber Security Matters Podcast we were joined by Alexandre Sieira, the Co-Founder and CTO of Tenchi Security, to talk about his experiences of startups and entrepreneurship within the sector. Alexandre is an executive with over two decades of experience in cyber security who is currently focused on helping companies leverage the benefits of cloud computing with security compliance through his startup, giving him some great insights into the topic. Here are the highlights of our conversation. 

What’s it like running a security startup?

It seems so glamorous – like it’s all staying in swanky hotels and talking to high-flying financiers in the VC world. Actually, it’s a lot of hard work. It’s it’s long hours. There’s no limit to the work you have to do – you can’t just say, ‘This is not my job description’ because, as an entrepreneur, your job description is infinite. When you’re an early-stage employee or a founder, you have to do everything from carrying boxes to making customers their coffee. You’re writing proposals, paying the accountant, double-checking the tax calculations, interviewing, hiring and leading people. It’s super hard to find people that are decent at all of those things or that enjoy doing all of those things, so at least 40-50% of the time, you’re doing stuff you’re not very good at or that you don’t enjoy until the company becomes big enough to hire people who are specialised in that task. You have to have a lot of energy to keep working, and you need a high tolerance for doing things you don’t enjoy. But the upside is getting to build something from scratch, and that’s super amazing.

You’ve been involved in several startups. Can you pinpoint any key themes that have made them successful?

It seems obvious when you say it, but you need to be doing something that people need. In technical startup terms, that’s called product market fit. You need to be building a product or service that people actually need and are willing to pay good money for. Then you need to execute it well because even if you are building something that people are willing to pay for, if you don’t make them aware that you exist, or you’re spending more than you’re earning on marketing, you’ll go broke. It all comes down to ideas and execution.

What do you think are the key ingredients you need to get investment?

I’ve been involved with three companies, one of which we started bootstrapped, then raised private equity for very late in the game. That was CIPHER. With a services company, it’s super easy for you to finance yourself, and you typically don’t need a lot of investment at the beginning like you do when you’re building a product. It’s very easy to get started and generate cash flow if you’re in the services business and you know what you’re doing. We wanted to do international expansion, so that’s when we raised private equity, which is a whole different ballgame from venture capital. 

Then with Niddel, we were a product company, but we weren’t bootstrapped. We could afford it because we had sold CIPHER, so we were using our own money to work for a year without getting paid because we had our savings. With Tenchi, this is our first VC-backed company, which is a completely different experience. It’s a different kind of sale. But, if you know how to run a company and you know how to sell, you just need to figure out what the buyer wants. You need to find the right buyers for what you’re selling and figure out the best way to communicate what you’re offering to them. Fundraising is no different. You need to be able to describe what you’re doing and why it’s interesting, and you need to find the right VCs who are active in your industry or sector but don’t have a conflict. 

The biggest difference is that when you’re talking to a customer, you’re saying, ‘Hey, this is the product, these are the technical features, these are the benefits of using the product’. Whereas with VCs, they’re looking for different things. They’re trying to assess the team background, dynamics, founders etc, especially if you’re an early-stage startup. The thing you need to think always when you’re talking to VCs is that much like security people, they’re trying to mitigate their risks. They’re so interested in founders because a lot of companies and founders fight amongst themselves and split up. Venture capital is a high-risk investment strategy, so you need to try to mitigate your risk for them as much as possible. 

What makes a good entrepreneur?

You need to have a high tolerance for pressure, handling setbacks and adjusting to doing everything yourself. There are a lot of people who flourish in the large enterprise environment where your job is narrow, and they get super specialised in what they do. They get to know everyone, work the political channels inside the company to get things done and they get joy out of it. One of my startups was acquired by a large company, and we were able to deliver amazing results there, but I did not enjoy the process of working there as much as doing entrepreneurship. 

If you get the right person in the wrong environment, they’re not going to succeed. There are people that would be amazing at an enterprise that would suck at being entrepreneurs. I’m the reverse; I think I’m good at entrepreneurship, but if you put me in a large political enterprise with lots of well-established processes and bureaucracy, I’ll slowly wither and die. It’s just I’m not going to enjoy myself and I’m not going to flourish. It’s all about matching the person with the environment. 

To hear more from Alexandre, tune into Episode 35 of The Cyber Security Matters Podcast here. 

We sit down regularly with some of the biggest names in our industry, we dedicate our podcast to the stories of leaders in the technologies industries that bring us closer together. Follow the link here to see some of our latest episodes and don’t forget to subscribe.     

Gender diversity has been a pressing issue within the cyber security industry for a number of years. On Episode 34 of The Cyber Security Matters Podcast, we were joined by Julia Weimer, the Director of Professional Services, EMEA at Lacework, to discuss the issue. Julia is passionate about gender diversity in cyber security, and actively participates in industry events and forums as an advocate for women. Julia regularly shares her insights and guidance with aspiring professionals to empower them in entering the cyber security space. 

Do you think mentoring and public speaking are good ways to spread awareness of women in STEM and tech? 

Absolutely. This is an opportunity for women to speak but also hear about the struggles of women in the industry. That helps people in the room feel like they’re going through a similar experience to the speaker or maybe find a nugget of inspiration to take on a new challenge or do something different. I think that it’s worthwhile to explore events like that with women and men. I say that based on the sheer numbers alone because there are more men in the industry, so we will need their help to get us to the next stage. 

I’ve witnessed the benefits of sponsorship in my own career. If we can bring more men into the mission that we’re on, we’ll have an equal composition of men and women in tech in the industry much faster. I really do believe that the more we can bring our male allies in the better the industry will be. We can empower them to speak on our behalf when we are not able to, bring a woman to a meeting that she wasn’t invited to, and speak up on our behalf when they know that we’re not being paid the same as our male counterparts. Those are opportunities for us to bring men into the conversation and realise it’s a men and women problem.

What advice do you have for male allies who want to stand up for women more?

Invite them to that meeting, include them in the conversation, and get their advice. Getting feedback from diverse perspectives is so important in the business world, because business can be quite boring if everybody has the same perspective and the same opinions. It’s it’s healthy to be challenged and see problems from a different viewpoint. Invite women to meetings, speak up for them, and if you notice a woman is quiet in the room, ask for her advice after the fact or ask what she thinks during the meeting to make her feel included.

What advice would you give as a mother who is successful in your career?

Being a woman and mother in tech specifically makes you realise that so many things outside of motherhood really don’t matter. It’s given me the confidence to know that if I need to take my child to a doctor’s appointment rather than taking a meeting, I will do it every day. I’m privileged to have a job where that’s okay and where my peers respect that. My advice to other full-time working mums is to lean into both. You can absolutely have both. Don’t let anyone make you feel bad for choosing that lifestyle. 

A lot of mothers have faced judgement for choosing not to stay home – there’s a lot of judgement that’s passed on women in general. But as a mum in tech, I truly lean into both. However, realising that you can’t do it all is important too. By that, I mean making sure that you can let your to-do list carry over to the next day. If you have responsibilities at home and in your job, you have to recognise that you may not get to everything that day, but be able to make the right decision for yourself. One of the key points when you look for a new role is whether you will have the people around you to support what you’re trying to do as a mum but also as a full-time employee.

What’s one piece of advice you give to someone entering the industry?

Women statistically do not apply to jobs that we do not feel qualified for. If there’s a job that seems interesting to you, apply for it. It just takes the first meeting for someone to see your potential or hear what you have to say. I think there’s no problem in saying ‘Why not’ and just going for it and giving it your best. 

Breaking into the industry has seemingly become harder. It is about using relationships to open a door. The more networking events you can attend, the more people you can meet and interact with, the better. You’ll meet respectable people in the industry who can help you and connect with you on LinkedIn so that when you’re asking for help and using the network to be able to do that, the right people will see it.

To learn more about gender diversity and the opportunities for women in the industry, tune into Episode 34 of The Cyber Security Matters Podcast here. 

We sit down regularly with some of the biggest names in our industry, we dedicate our podcast to the stories of leaders in the technologies industries that bring us closer together. Follow the link here to see some of our latest episodes and don’t forget to subscribe.     

Email security is an often overlooked area of the cyber security industry. On Episode 33 of The Cyber Security Matters Podcast, we spoke with Sam Hutchinson, the Co-Founder and CEO of Sendmarc, about how we can attract more engineers to the email security sector. Read on to find out more. 

What are the biggest opportunities for talent in email security?

It’s quite a crowded space, but email security is quite a big topic. But there are pockets of that topic which are not crowded at all. We operate in a macro area of that large sphere, where there isn’t much competition, or knowledge, either. That’s the weird thing about email; every company in the world uses it, yet engineering is focusing on much more popular things like AI or blockchain. No engineers come out of school and want to focus on email. It’s just not interesting enough or popular enough, but the opportunity is insane. It’s an unlimited market that shows incredible opportunity. Because it’s such a historical space, there’s been a lack of innovation for quite a long time, so there’s plenty of space for disruption.

What are the key talent topics that need addressing the most? 

I think we all admit that there is a small pool of talent, so the question which we often ask ourselves is, how do we become relevant to that talent? As we progress through different changes, what that talent needs in life changes too. If you think about a person who’s leaving university, what do they want out of a career? A person who’s 35 with a career, a working parent or a single person all need different things. You have to understand who you’re hiring and what they want, and then customise the position to be attractive to them. Ultimately, there’s an oversupply of work and an undersupply of talent. 

How are you securing talent at Sendmarc? 

We’ve gone on a journey with investors, and we’ve been able to raise funding so that we can hire top talent. Here’s a very interesting thing about top talent though: many people between 35 and 45 are highly skilled, but they’re frustrated with the machine. They’re searching for meaning. So we hired leaders first in our company, and then all of those leaders brought their teams with them. It was an incredibly efficient way to attract high-quality talent. Not only did we pay those people well so that they could look after their families, but we also gave them meaning. If you can create a high-performance environment that gives people the meaning that they’re looking for, you can attract the top talent in that sector.

How can businesses attract more diverse talent in this sector?

I completely believe in diversity, but if I look at my engineers, they’re mostly male. What we have to do when we hire somebody who doesn’t fit the stereotypes is embrace them so that they feel psychologically safe. We have zero tolerance for racism, sexism, or any sort of xenophobia, which means the minority always feel safe in our environment. If we start with getting it right with one or two diverse placements, and those people feel good, we’re more likely to attract more diverse talent. 

However, the fundamentals need to improve. How do we get more minority groups into engineering or finance, for example? How do we get more males into human resources? It’s more about generating interest in all these sectors. But I am trying at least to make minorities feel comfortable when they’re bucking the trend so that positive action keeps happening. 

To hear more from Sam, tune into Episode 33 of The Cyber Security Matters Podcast here. 

We sit down regularly with some of the biggest names in our industry, we dedicate our podcast to the stories of leaders in the technologies industries that bring us closer together. Follow the link here to see some of our latest episodes and don’t forget to subscribe.     

The software supply chain is ever-evolving. On Episode 32 of The Cyber Security Matters Podcast, we were joined by Luis Rodríguez Berzosa, the Chief Technology Officer at Xygeni, to explore the topic. He’s a physicist and mathematician who brings significant experience to the field of software engineering security, focusing on static analysis and software supply chain security. Here are his thoughts. 

How have you seen software supply chain security change over the last 20 years?

20 years is a long time in the IT industry, so our product security has improved a lot in that time. We’ve worked with APB security, position analysis, and static analysis – that’s the API security testing web application firewalls – which nobody uses anymore. Cloud-native protection has been another hot topic in recent years, and there are better mechanisms for patching or avoiding memory-related and other low-level security flows now. However, we are no better at securing the server product itself. 

Unfortunately, in the software supply chain, fewer resources are assigned to protecting the server infrastructure at the factory where software is built and deployed. Modern infrastructures have a large exposed attack surface, so the bad guys, who are always motivated to gain the most with the least effort, shifted their campaigns from the better-protected applications to the public packages and even the internal build and deployment systems. They attack the weaker points, so when we protect one thing, the attackers will look for another place to get in. Now they they use the software supply chain as an attack amplifier. 

What was your inspiration in founding the business? 

In the summer of 2021, we realised that software infrastructure security was lagging behind the rest of the sector. We started defining the project by establishing what exactly the needs were, analysing the potential market and testing what ideas could work. Then in December 2021 came the Log4J vulnerability, which created a shockwave in the entire software industry. That was the push we needed to start to decide to go on. In fact, we had been looking at cloud-native security during 2020 and 2021, but we were out of our element there because we are more traditional guys. With server security, we were at home. So we started with the project and went to market last year. We are now active in marketing and selling the platform.

What are the traditional methods of securing the software supply chain, and why aren’t they enough in today’s environment?

In the past, organisations would compile software artefacts, package them, and then digitally sign them with a code signing certificate for integrity protection. They then deployed them on an update site and were done. Now, attackers can penetrate a build system, inject malware in your software dependencies and embed malicious behaviour in your source code. They have changed their tactics and techniques. All the old methods do not work anymore because the attackers inject malicious code that will pass onto your customers. The problem is that the traditionally simple ways of protecting integrity by cold signing don’t work anymore.

One of the challenges within software supply chain security is keeping DevOps running while not whilst not falling under the supply chain attack. How does Xygeni solve this challenge?

You have to take a look at many different things. You have to automate those checks, compiling inventory and context because you have to know what is going where. You also need an alignment with industry standards because there are so many initiatives, ideas and best practices out there in supply chains. You have to get the best of them and put them on the ground to convert the generic principles into real actionable things. 

We have to try to take all the great ideas that are arising and figure out how they could be used in the real world. We put the emphasis on topics that we feel offered the best cost-benefit trade-off, such as detecting unusual activity or misconfigurations in real time. Our business is mainly international organisations who want to create software, but they feel they don’t need to secure the infrastructure. That means that features like semi-automated guidance will resolve a problem for them. They are looking for things like automation workflows and so on, so we try to provide them in our platform. Our focus is on helping users cope with a huge number of issues and the complexity of modern software.

To hear more from Luis, tune into Episode 32 of The Cyber Security Matters Podcast here. 

We sit down regularly with some of the biggest names in our industry, we dedicate our podcast to the stories of leaders in the technologies industries that bring us closer together. Follow the link here to see some of our latest episodes and don’t forget to subscribe.     

Mobile application security is a growing part of the Cyber Security industry. To help us understand and address those challenges, we were joined by Chris Roeckl, the Chief Product Officer at Appdome, on Episode 31 of The Cyber Security Matters Podcast. He shared his perspectives on the state of the sector, his insights into the key challenges of keeping mobile applications secure and its impact on compliance. Read on to find out what he said. 

How do you assess the state of the mobile security space as a whole?

The mobile app security market is rapidly changing. There are lots of reasons for that. Probably the most important one is that mobile apps are now the dominant channel for interacting with digital brands. It’s not about websites anymore, it’s all about mobile. The bad news here is that people who break into networks are zeroing in on mobile apps, which is driving the mobile security market. 

The challenge, particularly in today’s economy, is that CISOs and other decision-makers within mobile app security don’t have as many resources as they had in the past. They are either freezing their hiring or letting go of developed cybersecurity engineering teams just to cut costs. It’s like that old analogy of cutting off your nose to spite your face, but it is the reality of business today. They’re also trying to zero in on how to do more with less because 

budgets are under scrutiny. The thing is, bad actors aren’t taking the day off because of budget cuts and personnel reductions. The number of attacks just continues to grow and grow and grow. 

We don’t like to focus on scaring our customers or prospects, we want to help them. We don’t spend much time talking about the bad actors doing bad things, but they are, and the mobile brands we support know that. We don’t have to take that message to the market, so our focus is on getting them to an outcome. How do we how do we solve this problem? Every mobile brand’s challenge is unique, and our goal is to make sure that we can solve those unique challenges for them. 

How are these key challenges within mobile application security addressed?

The first thing that you have to realise is that web-based and desktop apps basically all have the same technological components, which makes it fairly simple to solve security problems. Now, in the mobile world, apps are built with 15 different development frameworks, which you can mix and match. You may have heard of things like Swift, Java, or Kotlin. They’re all different languages that you can code in. That creates unique scenarios. It’s not homogenous; it’s heterogeneous, which makes mobile app security difficult. 

The other thing is that there are a couple of different approaches to solving that. If you go back 5, or 10 years, software development kits were developed by security companies for mobile, and they basically give you some code. Your job as an enterprise or mobile brand was to add and maintain that code in your own application, which had its own challenges. The most simple challenge was that the software development kit you got might only work with 3 of the 15 development frameworks, so as a mobile developer, you have to make a choice to say either I need to rewrite my app to get in the security bits, or I need to go look for some other solution and then cobble it all together. 

At Appdome, we decided to take a completely different look at the market. We built a machine that takes account of all these frameworks and then builds an implementation of the security based on the buttons you tick on the platform for the security protections you need, and delivers that solution, with no coding needed. In a world where you’re losing resources, we think the movement to more of a machine-based approach to mobile app security is going to win the day. 

How does that impact the compliance side of things?

Cyber compliance is a really critical topic. Firstly, there are external regulatory compliance requirements. Secondly, there are a bunch of internal-facing requirements. Mobile brands oftentimes publish some sort of cyber pledge on their website for general security, saying ‘We protect your data this way.’ What is becoming very apparent is that those cyber pledges apply to the mobile app too – it’s not just about the website anymore. It’s not just about the way that your data is protected in the backend infrastructure; it is all about the mobile end user using a mobile app. 

Being able to do things like ensure that the cyber protections are actually built into the app is a cyber requirement, but the work is done by developers. So how do you bring the developers and cyber team together? Do you produce artefacts within the production process that say, ‘This encryption was added’, ‘Obfuscation was added’, or do you reverse engineer whatever the features are that the mobile brand is looking for? The ability to do things like UI testing is super important too. All of those compliance elements have to fit together into this jigsaw puzzle called mobile app development. Over the last two years, we’ve seen this go from kind of a low-level thing to a high priority within cyber organisations.

To find out more about securing mobile applications, tune into Episode 31 of The Cyber Security Matters Podcast here. 

We sit down regularly with some of the biggest names in our industry, we dedicate our podcast to the stories of leaders in the technologies industries that bring us closer together. Follow the link here to see some of our latest episodes and don’t forget to subscribe.     

There are talent shortages across the Cyber Security sector, and startups are no exception. On Episode 30 of The Cyber Security Matters Podcast we were joined by Crystal Poenisch, the Director of Product Marketing at Chainguard, to talk about her views on the talent issues facing the sector. Read on to find out what she said. 

What do you think companies can do to attract people from diverse and non-traditional backgrounds into the cybersecurity industry?

I think they’re already attracted – I think they’re desperately trying to get in. There are people more qualified than me that can’t get jobs. Companies need to make their company accessible and welcoming to diverse people from different backgrounds. I couldn’t be a director at a public company, they had to give me a ‘head of’ title because I didn’t have a master’s degree or an MBA. That was just five years ago. There are people who are attracted to the industry, so it’s about recognising the ones we can bring in and train up and not looking at it like we’re training them from the ground up. People from non-traditional and diverse backgrounds are often the fastest learners and the most agile and innovative people I’ve ever employed. 

How have you seen diversity kind of change in the industry since you joined?

It hasn’t changed as much as I’d like. I wish it would change more. I think one big thing that is really heartening for me is that there are male allies and allies across the board for people from all backgrounds, not just women. There is a lot more blatant support for these things and a greater recognition of the need for diversity. We need to hire more people, so more people are coming in and it is more welcoming. I see that the women who have come after me have had a much easier time, and it’s a lot easier to join now as someone from a non-traditional background.

You mentioned that bringing in people from a wide range of backgrounds benefits growth. Could you explain that a bit more? 

When building a startup, you need people with skin in the game who want to win as much as you do. People who have not been given a shot are gonna be pretty hungry to win, and I think that was our competitive advantage at Okta. We intentionally hired people from non-traditional backgrounds all over the world, and we adopted an international, remote-first style of work, even before COVID. 

We said, ‘Let’s get people from all different backgrounds who align with our values, and hire team players who are resilient, who want you to win, and who aren’t just in it for the paycheck. We’re looking for the people who are genuinely trying to change their lives, and get into cybersecurity to make their life better for their family.’ Those people are deeply invested in your success and are going to help you grow in ways you may not even imagine. They have so much to offer from different backgrounds, and that will come in handy when you really need utility players who are passionate about your company. 

What are the key talent topics that need addressing the most at the moment?

I can only speak for what I see in startups, but I think the Cyber Security industry faces a massive talent shortage. There are stats out there saying that there are a million jobs that we need to fill that we’re not filling. There’s a lot of people saying we could just automate those roles, we don’t need to increase diversity, equity and inclusion in the talent base, or that we could figure out a technical solution. I don’t want to say that’s naive, but we need to think bigger than that. 

Some leaders do this well, but I think we don’t hire for things like grit, resilience or people who have something different to bring to the table. When you have people always solving the same problems the same way from the same backgrounds, you become worse problem solvers. We need to adopt the mindset that we have done a less than sufficient job securing our critical infrastructure for the last however many years because no one has paid attention to the industry as a whole. It hasn’t been regulated, and diversity has not existed in Cyber Security. We’re seeing a lot of holes, and we’re seeing the pitfalls of that. 

There are a lot of problems we cannot solve in this industry right now because we don’t have enough innovative people involved. I speak from a Western and American perspective, but our biggest challenge is finding talented people. We need to learn to recognise talent in a more broad and cross-functional way because different people bring a lot to the table. If they haven’t been working in cybersecurity for 20 years, that might actually be a benefit. We need to learn to recognise different skill sets that maybe we haven’t had traditionally. 

To hear more from Crystal, tune in to Episode 30 of The Cyber Security Matters Podcast here. 

We sit down regularly with some of the biggest names in our industry, we dedicate our podcast to the stories of leaders in the technologies industries that bring us closer together. Follow the link here to see some of our latest episodes and don’t forget to subscribe.     

In Cyber Security, we are always looking for new, innovative ways to secure critical infrastructure. On Episode 29 of The Cyber Security Matters Podcast we spoke to Dmitriy Viktorov, the CTO of Tosibox, about how he’s bringing his experience with cloud protection solutions to a new market. Read on to find out more about securing data through OT networks. 

What are the main challenges associated with securing critical infrastructure?

I’m coming mainly from the IT security world, but now I’m jumping into what we call the industrial operational technology world. There are many similarities, especially on crates, but the OT and maybe IoT domains are lagging behind. They’re more conservative compared with IP or cybersecurity in general.

One thing that is quite important for customers is operational continuity. You can take some IT systems down for a short period of time if you need to patch it, update it or migrate it. In OT, it’s very difficult to do that because you are providing critical services, such as buildings, manufacturers, careers – you name it. You can’t take them down. If you want to apply a patch or you need to reconfigure something, that’s a big thing. 

We also know that the lifecycle for cybersecurity products is way longer than you might think because you don’t see the whole lifecycle. I remember when we were defining the lifecycle model, we said it would be a maximum of three years in OT, but it might actually be around five or even ten years in total. 

The other challenges in ICT and OT cybersecurity are the emphasis on legacy systems. There are several technologies in OT that are used by customers that rely on protocols, which have nothing to do with TCP IP. On the IT side, there are limited skills and technologies. It’s also about complexity and interdependencies – and again, a lack of patching and updates – and insider threats. Some infrastructures are physically exposed, which allows threats to get closer to them. 

How is Tosibox unique, and how does it solve some of those challenges?

Tosibox is in the specific niche of the whole of OT cybersecurity. However, we like focusing on network security. We are helping customers with at least one – or maybe a few – particular problems when it comes to OT cybersecurity and network segmentation. We are implementing access control, and we are making sure that our customers can do it easily, securely, and more automatically. Because, as I said previously, customers might use different technologies or different protocols, our unique proposition is that our platform is actually protocol-agnostic and even industry-agnostic. Even if you use old legacy technologies and devices, Tosibox makes it easy to connect with your IT network and then manage it remotely.

To hear more from Dmitriy, tune into Episode 29 of The Cyber Security Matters Podcast here.

We sit down regularly with some of the biggest names in our industry, we dedicate our podcast to the stories of leaders in the technologies industries that bring us closer together. Follow the link here to see some of our latest episodes and don’t forget to subscribe.