Steve McGregory is the Senior Director of the Application and Threat Intelligence (ATI) Research Center at Ixia, a Keysight Business. The ATI Research Center is responsible for gathering actionable, network application and security, intelligence for Ixia products and customers.

Steve has over 28 years of experience working in the field of Computer and Network Security. During his career, he has created network and security products at IBM, TippingPoint, SolarWinds, BreakingPoint, Ixia, and now Keysight.

Steve’s passion in work is to help educate people about, and protect people from, malicious digital attacks. He applies his passion through engineering, contributing to online publications, and speaking at technology events.

Implementing Continuous Offense, to Measure and Monitor Cybersecurity Defenses

This session is all about how knowledge of your cybersecurity products, processes, and people will make you more powerful.

We will take a journey through the entire path of an attack scenario, diving into the technologies meant to protect you and how they are meant to work.

Next, we will look at new technologies being engineered to help you perform deep assessment of your deployed security controls and highlight gaps that you can then work to fill. We will explore methodologies that are meant to help you perform these assessments, and track your coverage as you progress.

Your biggest challenge is the ever changing network, new tools, updates, patches, and policy, all of the things that happen every day. We will explore how to continuously monitor what’s currently working, enabling you to quickly identify a change that has had a negative impact on, or introduced a new gap in, your security.

If Equifax were following this methodology, they’d have escaped one of the biggest hacks of this decade. And, no, this isn’t just about patching. As any practitioner of cyber security would know, patching is easier said than done. What you learn from this talk will help you determine what corrective measure is your best option.

This knowledge can be applied no matter how small or large your network, no lab required. The path is one to a greater maturity level, to continuous monitoring and optimizing of your security tools, processes, and people.

The result will reveal a light at the end of the tunnel for all of us in the fight to secure our networks.

Objectives:

• Gain an understanding of what’s standing in the way of you being most effective in your security defense posture.
• Gain insight into security in depth, what it really means, how you measure each layer and use that knowledge to make decisions to improve.
• Use a risk assessment model to help you understand where to prioritize and focus on applying security in depth.
• Learn a methodology to assess and monitor your defenses continuously, methods that can be utilized by just about anyone.
• Learn how automation is used to repeatedly validate your baseline coverage, alerting you before the hackers find the gap.