Learning How to Learn: Mastering the Cyber Fundamentals with Rich Greene

In this episode, have James Hadley, CEO of Immersive Labs, and we talk about the best ways to learn in cybersecurity.  James starts the show with his background and what he is doing today, which is Immersive Labs.  But, he spent a lot of time in different organizations prior to that.   When it came to education, James found he had quite a poor memory, so he would always learn better through doing things rather than reading about things. Things would go in one ear and out the other. In addition to learning styles, they all discuss measuring education.  When it comes to measuring academics, for James it is all about the outcomes you want people to achieve.  They all agree that storytelling is incredibly powerful.  James shares a few of his own drawing back on his incredible journey.  And, of course, they round out the show with how to stay in touch and up to date with James.   Key Takeaways: 1:02 Welcome back 2:24 James’ background 5:06 Education experience 5:46 Changes 7:18 Measuring education 9:14 Balancing in testing 11:40 Biggest a’ha 13:14 Feedback 15:54 Learner vs. learner 17:37 Skill behind catching the bad guys 19:20 Applying knowledge 21:53 Geeks in the basement 23:47 The best job in cyber 26:30 Advice 27:58 How to stay in touch with James   Links: James on Immersive Labs James on LinkedIn Support Hacker Valley Studio on Patreon.  Follow Hacker Valley Studio on Twitter. Follow hosts Ron Eddings and Chris Cochran on Twitter. Learn more about our sponsor ByteChek.

2 Kesä 202129min

In this episode, we brought back fan-favorite, John Strand.  He is owner of Black Hills Information Security, a SANS instructor, and a mentor to many in the industry.  Johns starts the show sharing a little bit about his background and what he is doing today. Ron and Chris dive a little bit deeper into John’s earlier life asking what his personal superpower, personal or professional, and when did that power really came about in his life? John shares his experiences with failure, which he feels are key to where he is at today.  How everyone needs to get comfortable with struggles, failures and hardships.  On top of that, one needs to be able to laugh at themself.     Key Takeaways   1:02 Back with fan favorite John Strand 2:21 John shares his background 3:38 John’s superpower 5:51 Going through the grind to learn 8:30 Partnerships 11:44 Getting a head start 14:58 The entertainment factor 16:36 Journey through being an instructor 19:35 Pay what you can concept 25:53 Education systems 29:18 Advice from John   Links: John Strand blog. John Strand on Twitter. Support Hacker Valley Studio on Patreon.  Follow Hacker Valley Studio on Twitter. Follow hosts Ron Eddings and Chris Cochran on Twitter. Learn more about our sponsor ByteChek.

25 Touko 202131min

This is the finale of Know Thyself. What an incredible journey, we feel like this entire experience flew by so fast, we got to talk to so many incredible people about knowing yourself, knowing your team, knowing your tech stack, knowing your environment, and even knowing your story. Make your organization better make your security posture better, strive for impact, what are the most high leverage things that you can do today to make everybody's lives easier, or more safe, and then yield the feedback, there might be some things that you might be missing, you might need to ask questions, ask for feedback, get some information from your stakeholders, what what are you thinking about that I might not be thinking about? asking these different things is how you know thyself. And this is how you get to know the people that are around you, your peers, your stakeholders, the more knowledge you have got started with that Sun Tzu quote, in the very beginning of the podcast, if you know yourself and you know your enemy, you need not fear the results of 100 battles. So if you really understand yourself, and you have good threat intelligence, understanding the externals, you have good vulnerability management that understands the externals and the internals, if you mash all that information together, I think you'll be able to do great things with your cybersecurity program.   Key Takeaways 0:02 Introduction to the show 0:49 Our Sponsor, Axonius  2:09 Welcome back 2:31 Reflecting on Know Thyself 3:17 Recap This Seasons Guest 3:22 Marcus Carey 4:17 John Strand 5:05 Aaron Reinhart & Jamie Dixon 5:54 Chaos Engineering 7:12 Lenny Zeltser, asset inventory 7:54 Kevin Allison, Storytelling is a soft skill 10:19 John Strand 12:13 Can we do better? 13:54 What kind of leader are you? 14:26 Do you have unsupported devices? 17:34 Ask yourself these questions 13:33 Go back to the EASY Framework 21:50 Learning 23:29 Exploration 24:00 Immersion 27:28 Reach Hacker Valley   Learn more about Hacker Valley Studio Support Hacker Valley Studio on Patreon Follow Hacker Valley Studio on Twitter Follow Ron Eddings on Twitter Follow Chris Cochran on Twitter Supported by Axonius

18 Touko 202128min

In this masterclass of HVB season 2 we brought in a master story teller in Kevin Allison. The biggest thing is to get a person to understand, don't just summarize, don't just walk us through a Wikipedia like where you're just giving us a broad overview. And you're explaining; it’s important to remember sensory details that will help us see almost like movie scenes, what was happening between people. That is what brings the story alive. So that's a good case right there where the bones of the story were incredible. Like that's just on paper and an incredible overview of a story, but it's not going to work unless you can fill in all those sensory details that bring it alive and make it emotional for us. Storytelling is a soft skill that offers the ability to contextualize cybersecurity in a manner that any organization can understand to allow their business to stay safe.   Key Takeaways:   0:00 Previously on the show 2:37 Kevin introduction 3:20 Episode begins 3:39 Where Kevin is today 7:58 Kevin’s origin story 12:04 Cybersecurity is performing 17:08 Storytelling for business 21:00 Engineering a story 26:12 Authentic storytelling 34:54 Speaking isn’t perfect 41:02 Where to find Kevin   The Story Studio RISK!: True Stories People Never Thought They’d Dare To Share RISK! Podcast Twitter Facebook Instagram Risk Show Podcast Learn more about Hacker Valley Studio Support Hacker Valley Studio on Patreon Follow Hacker Valley Studio on Twitter Follow Ron Eddings on Twitter Follow Chris Cochran on Twitter Sponsored by Axonius

18 Touko 202142min

If want to get into computer security, you're going to learn to love it, you're going to have to be successful, because a lot of computer security isn't just about bits and bytes, it's really about effectively communicating what needs to be done to the right people. In this episode wet have the incredible John Strand. Organizations need to become more proactive, and see where those weak spots are to protect themselves from something like ransomware. You need to run a pen test because you can have somebody literally launch those attacks, and identify those weaknesses in those vulnerabilities before the bad people do. What's the gap that we can all learn from? It's passwords. By and large for most users, passphrases are the way to go. And, multi-factor authentication is actually a very sound strategy. If you look at one key tenant of computer security, complexity is the enemy of computer security. And security is constantly trying to catch up and protect against yesterday's attacks. So, the future is more connected, it's more complicated. And the problem is, we still have people that use weak passwords, we still have people that click on links from strangers. And ultimately, when we're looking at that future, you're going to see the exact same problems that we've always had complicated on a much, much, much, much, much larger scale. As things get more and more pushed to the cloud. There'll be no shelter here, the front line is everywhere. World of computer security.    Key Takeaways: 0:00 Previously on the show 2:02 John introduction 2:44 Episode begins 2:47 What John is doing today 3:45 John’s core tenets 5:51 How pen testing is “Blue” 6:17 Why understanding fundamentals matters 8:55 Ransomware 10:41 Organizations need to be prepared 11:58 Password gap 13:37 Password philosophy 17:07 Multi-factor authentication 21:40 What to do today 24:24 New problems 26:44 Learn your own network 28:26 Where to find John   John Strand on Twitter John Strand on LinkedIn Black Hills Information Security Learn more about Hacker Valley Studio Support Hacker Valley Studio on Patreon Follow Hacker Valley Studio on Twitter Follow Ron Eddings on Twitter Follow Chris Cochran on Twitter Sponsored by Axonius

18 Touko 202129min

In this episode, we brought in two exceptional guests that are no stranger to chaos. In fact, they've identified ways to engineer for chaos. In the studio, we have Aaron Rinehart, CTO, and founder at Verica. We also have Jamie Dicken, former manager of applied security at Cardinal Health and current director at Resilience. These two are also authors of Security Chaos Engineering. If you haven't read that book it's already out, you should check it out.  Chaos engineering is the technique of introducing turbulent conditions into a distributed system to try to determine the conditions that cause it to fail before it actually fails. So they simplify it. What we do with chaos engineering is learn about the system without experiencing the pain of an outage or an incident. You learn to trust your gear by testing. The biggest impact really came once we understood how security chaos engineering fits into the bigger security picture. It's not about just being a part of the latest and greatest techniques and having the excitement of doing something that's cutting edge, but security chaos engineering at the end of the day. It's useless unless what you've learned drives change.    Key Takeaways: 0:00 Previously on the show 1:40 Aaron Rinehart and Jamie Dixon introduction  2:08 Episode begins 2:59 What Jamie and Aaron are doing today 3:13 What Jamie is doing 4:13 What Aaron is doing 5:00 Discuss chaos engineering 9:26 Importance of chaos engineering 10:16 Myths of chaos engineering 12:55 Chaos engineering customer impacts 17:34 Learning to trust the test and end result 19:03 Reader and customer feedback 22:21 Chaos engineering gone wrong 27:39 Implementing change in cybersecurity 28:11 Building a team of experts 39:08 Getting involved in chaos engineering  41:09 Tools for listeners 43:25 Keeping up with Aaron and Jamie     Aaron Rinehart on Twitter aaron@verica.io Jamie Dicken on Twitter Verica on LinkedIn Verica Free Book  Learn more about Hacker Valley Studio Support Hacker Valley Studio on Patreon Follow Hacker Valley Studio on Twitter Follow Ron Eddings on Twitter Follow Chris Cochran on Twitter Sponsored by Axonius

18 Touko 202144min

In this episode, we brought back our good friend Lenny Zeltser.  Lenny is Chief Information Security Officer at Axonius.  He's developed a mindset of looking at security components as building blocks to create a holistic security environment. To this day, even while operating as an executive, he has wisdom that anyone can learn from. Quite often, the less sexy aspects of information security are ignored, when in reality, you need to understand what resources you're supposed to protect, which assets are compromised, and the infrastructure for your organization.  People jump right into fighting the big fires, and as you know, there is a reason why there are so many day-to-day urgent activities.  To start moving in a positive direction, Lenny shares this advice, “Understand what the major data sources you can tap into rather than thinking ‘let me create this one new way of serving everything I have are.’”  The information is there. Think about three sources of information that might get you the biggest bang for the buck!   Key Takeaways:   0:00 Previously on the show 1:40 Lenny introduction 2:05 Episode begins 3:10 What Lenny is doing today 5:35 The evolution of Lenny’s career 8:30 Parallels between beginning and now 10:38 Journey and growth of REMnux 13:00 Challenges Lenny has faced 15:21 Collaboration surprises 17:18 Horror stories 20:18 Enforcing policies 23:34 Asset management 26:08 New tech and trends 28:45 Biggest discovery about self 32:38 Advice for others 34:24 Keeping up with Lenny     Links:   What Lenny Does   Lenny on the Web   Follow Lenny on Twitter   Lenny on LinkedIn   Learn more about Hacker Valley Studio   Support Hacker Valley Studio on Patreon   Follow Hacker Valley Studio on Twitter   Follow Ron Eddings on Twitter   Follow Chris Cochran on Twitter   Sponsored by Axonius

18 Touko 202135min

In this episode of Hacker Valley Blue, we brought in a guest who has been on a journey of transformation of self and technology.  Our guest is Chani Simms, managing director of Meta Defence Labs.  We talk about what is essential for cybersecurity.  If there was a magic box that could solve an issue, what problem would Chani want solved? “People!”  They need to be trained, and care, and have buy in.  They must be devoted to what they’re doing.  They need cultural awareness and support – it isn’t easy and the hardest job.   When it comes to leadership, organizations need to use people already in the organization.  It is important to know what they’re trying to do.  You have to use security as an enabler.  Leadership is responsible for communicating objectives and goals.     Key Takeaways 0:00 Previously on Hacker Valley Blue 1:36 In this episode 3:10 Background and day job 5:37 Cyber essentials 13:46 Keeping up to date 15:26 Access control 17:07 Security hygiene 19:48 Magic box 21:32 Leadership fundamentals 26:22 Formula 1 analogy 28: 46 Wrap up   Links: Chani on LinkedIn Chani on Twitter Email: info@metadefencelabs.com Sponsored by Axonius Hacker Valley Studio Chris Cochran on LinkedIn Ron Eddings on LinkedIn

18 Touko 202129min