The Security Stories podcast is all about security leaders sharing their journeys with us. In our latest episode, we have some very meaningful stories to talk about with you.

Our main interview is with Andy Ellis. On the very day we interviewed him, he was celebrating his 20th anniversary as the Chief Security Officer for Akamai.

We cover many topics – from taking down the “booth babe” culture at RSA, to fighting for more representation and diversity on cyber panels, to how he eliminated the password at his organization and built a Zero Trust network. Before that became a thing.

Andy also shares one of the most interesting Star Wars theories we’ve ever heard. Plus he has a fascinating take on heroes vs villains, and how the two overlap depending on who’s telling the story. He then talks about why he hires librarians and journalists in his security team, and also, exactly how hard it is to train lizards. (The last two topics aren’t related, by the way!)

We finish the interview by touching on some of Andy’s top cyber threat predictions. You can read Akamai’s “State of the Internet” report for more info on this.

In the studio, Hazel and Ben are joined (virtually) again by Noureen Njoroge. Noureen talks incredibly passionately about her advocacy roles for women and minorities in cybersecurity. And she talks about why she set up the mentor/mentee group for women in cybersecurity, which has been an incredible support mechanism for many.

For anyone who wants to know more about what they can do to give more opportunities for others – don’t miss this section.

For our ‘Emerging Threats’ feature, we cover Ripple20: a set of 19 critical vulnerabilities impacting a TCP/IP software stack. It’s used by wide variety of vendors and installed on millions of systems: enterprise network, consumer devices, but also IIoT. More details can be read about this in our blog:

And finally we have our ‘On this Day’ feature, which is when we jump into the DeLorean and head back in time to explore a significant security event.

This time we’re travelling back to 2001 to talk about Sircam, which was a notable worm that spread by email. The series of unfortunate events often started with a couple of lines of text that began ‘I send you this file in order to have your advice’.

If you’d like to know more about the advocacy roles for women and minorites that Noureen is involved in, as well as access a wealth of cybersecurity resources, you can check them out at https://cybersecmentorship.org

You can listen to this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or wherever you normally get your podcasts from! You can also listen right here and now:

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