Episodes

Click here to send us your ideas and feedback on Blueprint! In this solo episode to wrap up season 2, John discusses some of the key takeaways from the guests interviwed throughout this year, and has some very exciting news for all blue teamers on a brand new GIAC certification. ;) Link: (GIAC GSOC LINK HERE) John is a Security Operations Center (SOC) consultant and speaker, a Certified SANS instructor, and the course author of two SANS courses, SEC450: Blue Team Fundamentals - Security Ope...

Click here to send us your ideas and feedback on Blueprint! We all need solid, well though-out playbooks to help standardize our respons to common threat scenarios. In this episode we speak with Thomas Detzner and Mark Morowczynski about the brand new set of Microsoft incident response playbooks that were just released. This is a brand new effort to meticulously document prerequisites, investigation steps, and remediation process for common scenarios most commonly seen by the Microsoft incide...

Click here to send us your ideas and feedback on Blueprint! Compliance and audit checks can be painful, and that's before you introduce additional cloud services and technology. In this episode featuring AJ Yawn we discuss some incredibly useful and actionable cloud security concepts and tools that can help your team boost visibility and reduce user permissions to help prevent breaches before they happen. In addition, we discuss what a good compliance audit should be, and how to turn audits f...

Click here to send us your ideas and feedback on Blueprint! There are numerous ways to test your SOC's detection and prevention capabilities, but not all are created equal. Each has their own strengths and weaknesses, and can be done on a different time scale.This week, we focus on arguably one of the most important - adversary emulation. In this episode we speak with Jamie Williams from the MITRE ATT&CK team about why adversary emulation is important, how it works, how you can get starte...

Click here to send us your ideas and feedback on Blueprint! PowerShell may seem intimidating, but it can be one of the most amazing and useful tools at your disposal...if you know how to use it. In this episode, we have Josh Johnson, author of the new SANS course "SEC586: Blue Team Operations - Defensive Powershell" giving you a masterful crash course in: - The importance of PowerShell - How PowerShell works, and how to set yourself up to use it - Blue team use cases for log analysis, incid...

Click here to send us your ideas and feedback on Blueprint! This episode is all about vulnerability management - both the technical and human aspects. Looking to start up a new vulnerability management team? Drowning in vulnerabilities to fix and don't know where to start? Struggling to get system owners to take action? Trying to find ways to communicate the importance and status of your patching efforts? Check out this episode with vulnerability management expert Chris Baker for answer the...

Click here to send us your ideas and feedback on Blueprint! A common question from many defenders is "Which logs are the most important?” In this episode, Mick Douglas and Flynn Weeks join us to describe their What2Log project, which aims to simplify this problem for all of us! Our Guests: Mick Douglas & Flynn Weeks Mick Douglas is the Managing Partner of InfoSec Innovations. He is a SANS certified instructor and is a member of the IANS faculty. In his spare time, he tries in vain to imp...

Click here to send us your ideas and feedback on Blueprint! In today’s episode, John is joined by Anton Chuvakin to discuss current and future security operations technology, which tools are the most important and which are becoming less important over time, the rules of automation in the SOC and how Anton would setup a modern Security Operations Center for a Cloud native organization. Today's Guest: Anton Chuvakin Dr. Anton Chuvakin is a recognized security expert in the field of log manage...

Click here to send us your ideas and feedback on Blueprint! Are you a manager looking to build or improve your SOC? Are you trying to understand how to measure your SOCs maturity or use cases or your threat hunting efforts? If so, today’s episode with Rob van Os is for you. In this episode, we discuss the SOC CMM for SOC maturity measurement, the magma use case framework for building and tracking SOC use cases, and the Tahiti threat hunting methodology for showing ROI on threat hunting. Our...

Click here to send us your ideas and feedback on Blueprint! What is AppSec, DevOps and DevSecOps? In this episode we discuss why defenders should know more about these terms and what the consequences are of ignoring these new and critical fields. Tanya Janca, also known as SheHacksPurple, is the best-selling author of ‘Alice and Bob Learn Application Security’. She is also the founder of We Hack Purple, an online learning academy, community and podcast that revolves around teaching everyone ...

Click here to send us your ideas and feedback on Blueprint! Driving consistency and maintaining a high standard for alert response is a problem all SOCs must face, but how? In this episode, Josh Brower describes his efforts to combine automated detection signature deployment and use case database management into a single, easy to use app for Security Onion. Whether you use Security Onion or not, this episode dives into the design principles and workflow Josh used when designing the new open-s...

Click here to send us your ideas and feedback on Blueprint! Even if you're not a malware analyst, any blue teamer should be able to do some initial basic malware sample triage. The good news is that this is quite easy to do using freely available tools once you know what is available. Join John in this conversation with Ryan Chapman as they discuss how to reverse engineer malware and why you might want to do so. Our Guest - Ryan Chapman Ryan Chapman works as a Principal Incident Response ana...

Click here to send us your ideas and feedback on Blueprint! Looking for a new way to approach the difficult problem of measuring and improving your SOC? Check out this episode to hear how to use methods pioneered in the manufacturing and reliability industry to help wrap your head around, and solve this complex issue. You don’t want to miss this episode with Jon Hencinski, Director of Operations at Expel who covers all of this and more. Our guest - Jon Hencinski Jon Hencinski is the Director...