EP266 Resetting the SOC for Code War: Allie Mellen on Detecting State Actors vs. Doing the Basics

About this episode

Allie Mellen discusses the implications of nation-state cyberattacks and the evolving landscape of cybersecurity in the context of her book 'Code War'.

Guest: Allie Mellen , Principal Analyst @ Forrester , author of "Code War: How Nations Hack, Spy, and Shape the Digital Battlefield" Topics: Your book focuses on the US, China, and Russia. When you were planning the book did you also want to cover players like Israel, Iran, and North Korea? Most of our listeners are migrating to or operating heavily in the cloud. As nations refine their "digital battlefield" strategies, does the "shared responsibility model" actually hold up against a nation-state actor? How does a company's detection strategy need to change when the adversary isn't a teenager looking for a ransom, but a state-funded group whose goal might be long-term persistence or subtle data manipulation? How should people allocate their resources to defending against both of these threats? How afraid are you of a "bad guy with AI" scenarios? Mild anxiety or apocalyptic fears? Do you see AI primarily helping "Tier 2" nations close the capability gap with the "Big Three," or does it just further cement the dominance of the nations that own the underlying compute and models? You've spent a lot of time as an analyst looking at how enterprises buy and run security tech. For a…

People in this episode

Host: Anton Chuvakin

Guest: Allie Mellen

Topics covered

• nation-state cyberattacks
• cloud security
• detection strategies
• AI in cybersecurity
• shared responsibility model
• resource allocation
• security theater

Keywords

• cybersecurity
• nation-state actors
• cloud migration
• detection strategy
• AI threats
• credential theft
• security technology

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Forrester

Books & works: Code War: How Nations Hack, Spy, and Shape the Digital Battlefield

Places: US, China, Russia, Israel, Iran, North Korea

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