Autonomous - I don't think that word means what you think it means - Adam Shostack, Ely Kahn - ESW #359

A clear pattern with startups getting funding this week are "autonomous" products and features.

• Automated detection engineering
• Autonomously map and predict malicious infrastructure
• ..."helps your workforce resolve their own security issues autonomously"
• automated remediation
• automated compliance management & reporting

I'll believe it when I see it. Don't get me wrong, I think we're in desperate need of more automation when it comes to patching and security decision-making. I just don't think the majority of the market has the level of confidence necessary to trust security products to automate things without a human in the loop.

The way LimaCharlie is going about it, with their new bi-directional functionality they're talking up right now, might work, as detections can be VERY specific and fine-grained.

We've already seen a round of fully automated guardrail approaches (particularly in the Cloud) fail, however. My prediction? Either what we're seeing isn't truly automated, or it will become a part of the product that no one uses - like Metasploit Pro licenses.

 

We've talked about generative AI in a general sense on our podcast for years, but we haven't done many deep dives into specific security use cases. That ends with this interview, as we discuss how generative AI can improve SecOps with Ely Kahn. Some of the use cases are obvious, while others were a complete surprise to me. Check out this episode if you're looking for some ideas!

This segment is sponsored by SentinelOne. Visit https://securityweekly.com/sentinelone to learn more about them!

 

This is a great interview with Adam Shostack on all things threat modeling. He's often the first name that pops into people's heads when threat modeling comes up, and has created or been involved with much of the foundational material around the subject. Adam recently released a whitepaper that focuses on and defines inherent threats.

Resources:

• Here's the Inherent Threats Whitepaper
• Adam's book, Threat Modeling: Designing for Security
• Adam's latest book, Threats: What Every Engineer Should Learn from Star Wars
• We mention the Okta Breach - here's my writeup on it
• We mention the CSRB report on the Microsoft/Storm breach, here's Adam's blog post on it
• And finally, Adam mentions the British Library incident report, which is here, and Adam's blog post is here

Visit https://www.securityweekly.com/esw for all the latest episodes!

Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/esw-359