OK, I Get It. You’re All Special Snowflakes.

All links and images for this episode can be found on CISO Series

https://cisoseries.com/ok-i-get-it-youre-all-special-snowflakes/

This department manager thinks their data is the most important. But then this department manager thinks their data is the most important. Can there really be so many crown jewels in your company that are all equally important? How's a CISO supposed to prioritize?

This episode is hosted by me, David Spark (@dspark), producer of CISO Series and Mike Johnson. Our guest this week is Melody Hildebrandt (@mhil1), executive vp, consumer products and engineering, and CISO, Fox

Thanks to our podcast sponsor, Herjavec Group

Herjavec Group excels in complex, multi-technology environments and keeps enterprise organizations secure with best of breed products and comprehensive service offerings. With 5 global Security Operations Centers, emerging technology partners, and a dedicated team of security specialists, we are well-positioned to be your organization’s trusted advisor in cybersecurity. Let’s connect!

On this week's episode

Hey, you're a CISO, what's your take?

Recently, we did a Friday video chat on "Hacking the Crown Jewels" where we talked about what's really important, where it resides, and who's accessing it and when. One of the questions that came up from consultant Ian Poynter was how do you handle the conflicts from the different department leaders as to what the crown jewels are? And Jakub Kaluzny of SecuRing asked, "What's harder, identifying your crown jewels, or protecting them?"

Can you change Mike's mind?

Our guest, Melody Hildebrandt mentioned that as of recently she was in a pro-vendor mood Only three months into the year she has taken more new vendor meetings than in all of 2020. What changed? And can she convince Mike to do the same?

"What's Worse?!"

As always, this will be a surprise on the show. And no one will like the options.

If you haven’t made this mistake, you’re not in security

Even if you've configured your email security platform correctly, you can still fail early and often as our guest Melody discovered. But she actually published her findings on Tech Insiders, along with Paul Cheesbrough. Examples she provided included email account compromises that resulted in full evasion of standard email defenses. And given that her business is often an early target for new attacks, protection through threat analysis has become essentially useless. Her solution for enterprise email is to adopt an API-based solution instead of gateways, along with deep machine learning, and continuous protection of email rather than initial scanning and approval. Let's look at how difficult this shift was and how Melody is managing it.

There’s got to be a better way to handle this

On Twitter I asked, "Since security people don’t get applause when nothing happens, how do you let the rest of the company know how well the security team is doing?" One mentioned a slide on reports that says "X days without a breach" others suggested showing improvements to metrics like vulnerability and mean time to response. So what do we say to the whole company, not just the board?