Hacker Valley Blue S2 Episode 6 - John Strand

May 18, 2021

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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