Author Archives: Patrick O'Neill

Masha Sedova, Co-founder, Elevate Security The human factor is maybe the biggest unsolved problem in cybersecurity. How do you fix people so they can do security more effectively? How do you fix security so it fits people better? Masha Sedova ran the team whose job it was to change security behavior at Salesforce from 2012 until Dec. 2016. At the end of the year, she co-founded Elevate Security, where she tests user behavior and puts them on campaigns to practice new security behavior.  Can you talk about where we are today versus where we were then on human behavior and awareness and cybersecurity? It seems like a different environment but what have you seen actually working on this? It’s been slower than I’d like it to be. Security professionals have been trying to solve the people problem for decades. We’re not very good at it. We’re really good at security, we’re not […]

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Amanda Rousseau, Malware Researcher, Endgame Amanda Rousseau’s job puts her knee deep in the guts of malware. A research engineer at Endgame, Rousseau’s history includes two years at the Department of Defense Cyber Crime Center as a malware reverse engineer and computer forensic examiner. Malware is weird and ever changing, so we talked to Rosseau about exactly what she’s seen and where she’s looking next. What’s the most interesting or powerful malware you’ve seen? I actually have a couple of my favorites. They’re all APT malware. Everyone knows Stuxnet and Flame from the same creators, some of the most advanced malware out there. I particularly like the more multi-platform type of malware, kind of like the Careto mask. It was a multi-stage attack, it had payloads for both Windows and OS X and it could be run on Linux as well. I thought that was quite interesting. These guys thought about going after whatever environments a […]

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Jessy Irwin, VP of Privacy and Security, Mercury LLC If you’ve ever been too an information security conference, you’ve probably seen a t-shirt that said, “there’s no patch for human stupidity.” That iffy diss—and lame t-shirt—about sums up the icy tone the security community has taken over the last few decades when it comes to users. Figuring out a newer and more effective approach is the burgeoning field in which Jessy Irwin, the vice president of privacy and security at Mercury, works. Instead of the same old people talking down to users, Irwin advocates for the “weirdest and most strange, diverse groups of people” at work in security, all the better to deal with the weird, strange and diverse users that end up with the products they build. Why are security professionals so bad at the human question? I think people are bad at the ‘people’ question. I think much of […]

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