Richard Stiennon of IT-Harvest

Jeremy Snyder sits down with industry analyst Richard Stiennon, founder of IT-Harvest and author of the annual Security Yearbook, for a tour of the cybersecurity industry from the inside. Richard has been tracking this space for more than twenty-five years, and he takes us from the days when a firewall and antivirus were the whole security stack, through the Windows NT and VMware era, and into a present he describes bluntly: the most important new threat actor is not a human, it is "an alien of our own making." Along the way the two get into why Microsoft built the security industry by accident, why nobody actually pays for more security, why network segmentation is still undone after three decades, and why Richard is 99% excited and 1% ready to move to the country and trap rabbits.

Key Discussion Points

• Richard's path from aerospace engineer to analyst, including founding an early Michigan ISP, running the firewall lab at PwC, and building IT-Harvest as a "Dataquest for cybersecurity."
• His view that Microsoft created the security industry by shipping insecure software, and how the Windows NT server era gave way to VMware and the modern data center.
• The move from risk modeling to threat modeling. In an era where an AI attacker has no cost ceiling and never gives up, "increasing the cost for the attacker" no longer works.
• Why ransomware victims, in his words, revealed they under-invested, and why most organizations still turn away from better security because they want ease of use and cost savings.
• The post-Hugging Face reality: a non-human, exhaustive attacker that chains vulnerabilities until it gets in, and why the answer is doing the security basics far better than ever, starting with segmentation and detection and response.
• The Security Yearbook going digital, the explosion from 84 tracked AI security vendors to more than 500, and Richard's prediction that soon every company will be an AI security company.

About Richard Stiennon

Richard has tracked the cybersecurity industry for over two decades — as VP of Research at Gartner, CMO at Fortinet, and the author of 14+ books, including the annual Security Yearbook. IT-Harvest puts that career of research into a platform anyone can use.

Episode Links

https://it-harvest.com/https://stiennon.substack.com/richard’s

https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B003L5VNJ8?ccs_id=3d5ab76e-1f39-4401-a94a-ccf703da9d07and

https://www.amazon.com/Guardians-Machine-Age-Security-Digital-ebook