Recognizing the inevitability of state-sponsored attacks and the need for robust defenses. Edward Fry stated:

"Our country has threat actors like that... But the real thing is from a corporate perspective or from a state perspective, you have to realize that those actors are out there, and so you have to implement those controls to try and prevent that."

Takeaway:

• Acknowledge the threat of sophisticated attackers.
• Implement strong security frameworks.
• Focus on prevention and resilience.

Emphasizing the necessity of testing failure scenarios to ensure system resilience. Edward Fry explained:

"The problem was that they didn't test that failure state. So once it went into failure, then that failure state was then overwhelmed, which caused us a secondary outage which then made it so that those logs didn't get to those customers."

Takeaway:

• Regularly test system failure modes.
• Ensure fallback mechanisms are robust under load.
• Anticipate cascading failures in system design.

Discussing how AI improves the believability of phishing attacks, posing new challenges. Edward Fry said:

"And the spelling mistakes and all of those things are starting to go away... if you have a writing sample for somebody, then you know how they talk or you know how they write their email so you can tailor it much more closely to that. I think it's gonna be a difficult challenge."

Takeaway:

• Enhance email filtering and detection tools.
• Increase user awareness about sophisticated phishing.
• Encourage verification of unexpected communications.

Highlighting the increasing threat of AI-powered fraud and its implications for security awareness. Edward Fry warned:

"I think this is only gonna get worse... Some of the recommendations within the article are limit your public exposure. Well, here we are on a public podcast, with our voices nice and clear. It's all out there... I think it's getting better for the hackers... It's gonna be harder for us to train our employees and our friends and colleagues and family on how to prevent this."

Takeaway:

• Update security training to address AI-enabled threats.
• Be cautious with public personal information.
• Implement multi-layered verification processes.

Emphasizing the importance of early detection to reduce dwell time and mitigate damage from advanced persistent threats. Edward Fry questioned:

"It says in the article that they were detected around April and lasted from April to August. So my question there was, was the attack actually detected way back in April... Or was this forensically detected later?... So that's one question I had."

Takeaway:

• Invest in advanced threat detection capabilities.
• Reduce dwell time by proactive monitoring.
• Understand attack timelines for effective response.

Analyzing how changes in state actions against cybercriminals may influence cyber threats. Edward Fry observed:

"So this is something that I find kind of interesting because as you said, they don't typically crack down on the cyber criminals so long as they're not acting against the state. So the question is... is it that they weren't cooperating with the state... or that they actually also tried to go after their local state infrastructure and that sort of thing."

Takeaway:

• Monitor geopolitical shifts affecting cybercrime.
• Anticipate changes in threat actor behaviors due to state policies.

Addressing the limitations of MFA and the need for additional defenses against advanced attacks. Edward Fry stated:

"This one's tough because... implementing multi-factor authentication was supposed to be part of the end all to prevent that sort of credential harvesting... But now you've got an adversary in the middle of the proxy the connections. How do we solve this?... What are the steps that I could do as a practitioner to prevent this when I don't control the middle?"

Takeaway:

• Explore additional security layers beyond MFA.
• Educate users about advanced phishing techniques.
• Consider implementing phishing-resistant MFA methods.

Discussing the barriers to widespread adoption of encrypted communication due to interoperability issues. Edward Fry noted:

"I think there's some aspects of this that are very interesting for secure communications... But I think just in general, this is a hard ask right now for me to communicate with my mom or my friends who are on different platforms... but there's not a lot of interop... we really need to get the iPhone to Android type of communication and get those companies to cooperate."

Takeaway:

• Encourage cooperation between companies for cross-platform encryption.
• Understand user convenience is key to security adoption.

Highlighting the limitations of relying solely on policies to mitigate security risks posed by employees. Edward Fry explained:

"So my thoughts on this are if a system needs to be secure, you can't just have a written policy saying don't do this. ... So if you have this sort of policy where you don't want people to access things from their personal computer... you implement a control... making it so that it's not possible to bypass the security controls. Preventative is always better."

Takeaway:

• Implement technical controls to enforce security policies.
• Use preventative measures rather than relying on user compliance.

This topic emphasizes the importance of robust change management to prevent data loss and service outages impacting security operations. Edward Fry stated:

"But one thing about that is we had a very similar event just one month prior that lasted two weeks where Microsoft lost logs for a long time. ... So some of the things that I think here are, what are we doing when we're pushing changes that could impact our customers... how are we testing those changes?"

Takeaway:

• Implement thorough testing before deploying changes.
• Test failure states and fallback mechanisms.
• Ensure critical logging services have redundancies.