EP236 Accelerated SIEM Journey: A SOC Leader's Playbook for Modernization and AI
Guest: Manija Poulatova, Director of Security Engineering and Operations at Lloyd's Banking Group Topics: SIEM migration is hard, and it can take ages. Yours was - given the scale and the industry - on a relatively short side of 9 months. What’s been your experience so far with that and what could have gone faster? Anton might be a “reformed” analyst but I can’t resist asking a three legged stool question: of the people/process/technology aspects, which are the hardest for this transformation? What helped the most in solving your big challenges? Was there a process that people wanted to keep but it needed to go for the new tool? One thing we talked about was the plan to adopt composite alerting techniques and what we’ve been calling the “funnel model” for detection in Google SecOps. Could you share what that means and how your team is adopting? There are a lot of moving parts in a D&R journey from a process and tooling perspective, how did you structure your plan and why? It wouldn’t be our show in 2025 if I didn’t ask at least one AI question! What lessons do you have for other security leaders preparing their teams for the AI in SOC transition? Resources: EP234 The SIEM Paradox: Logs, Lies, and Failing to Detect EP197 SIEM (Decoupled or Not), and Security Data Lakes: A Google SecOps Perspective EP231 Beyond the Buzzword: Practical Detection as Code in the Enterprise EP184 One Week SIEM Migration: Fact or Fiction? EP125 Will SIEM Ever Die: SIEM Lessons from the Past for the Future EP223 AI Addressable, Not AI Solvable: Reflections from RSA 2025 “Maverick” — Scorched Earth SIEM Migration FTW! blog “Hack the box” site
--------
27:15
--------
27:15
EP235 The Autonomous Frontier: Governing AI Agents from Code to Courtroom
Guest: Anna Gressel, Partner at Paul, Weiss, one of the AI practice leads Episode co-host: Marina Kaganovich, Office of the CISO, Google Cloud Questions: Agentic AI and AI agents, with its promise of autonomous decision-making and learning capabilities, presents a unique set of risks across various domains. What are some of the key areas of concern for you? What frameworks are most relevant to the deployment of agentic AI, and where are the potential gaps? What are you seeing in terms of how regulatory frameworks may need to be adapted to address the unique challenges posed by agentic AI? How about legal aspects - does traditional tort law or product liability apply? How does the autonomous nature of agentic AI challenge established legal concepts of liability and responsibility? The other related topic is knowing what agents “think” on the inside. So what are the key legal considerations for managing transparency and explainability in agentic AI decision-making? Resources: Paul, Weiss Waking Up With AI (Apple, Spotify) Cloud CISO Perspectives: How Google secures AI Agents Securing the Future of Agentic AI: Governance, Cybersecurity, and Privacy Considerations
--------
34:06
--------
34:06
EP234 The SIEM Paradox: Logs, Lies, and Failing to Detect
Guest: Svetla Yankova, Founder and CEO, Citreno Topics: Why do so many organizations still collect logs yet don’t detect threats? In other words, why is our industry spending more money than ever on SIEM tooling and still not “winning” against Tier 1 ... or even Tier 5 adversaries? What are the hardest parts about getting the right context into a SOC analyst’s face when they’re triaging and investigating an alert? Is it integration? SOAR playbook development? Data enrichment? All of the above? What are the organizational problems that keep organizations from getting the full benefit of the security operations tools they’re buying? Top SIEM mistakes? Is it trying to migrate too fast? Is it accepting a too slow migration? In other words, where are expectations tyrannical for customers? Have they changed much since 2015? Do you expect people to write their own detections? Detecting engineering seems popular with elite clients and nobody else, what can we do? Do you think AI will change how we SOC (Tim: “SOC” is not a verb?) in the next 1- 3 -5 years? Do you think that AI SOC tech is repeating the mistakes SOAR vendors made 10 years ago? Are we making the same mistakes all over again? Are we making new mistakes? Resources: EP223 AI Addressable, Not AI Solvable: Reflections from RSA 2025 EP231 Beyond the Buzzword: Practical Detection as Code in the Enterprise EP228 SIEM in 2025: Still Hard? Reimagining Detection at Cloud Scale and with More Pipelines EP202 Beyond Tiered SOCs: Detection as Code and the Rise of Response Engineering “RSA 2025: AI’s Promise vs. Security’s Past — A Reality Check” blog Citreno, The Backstory “Parenting Teens With Love And Logic” book (as a management book) “Security Correlation Then and Now: A Sad Truth About SIEM” blog (the classic from 2019)
--------
37:59
--------
37:59
EP233 Product Security Engineering at Google: Resilience and Security
Guest: Cristina Vintila, Product Security Engineering Manager, Google Cloud Topic: Could you share insights into how Product Security Engineering approaches at Google have evolved, particularly in response to emerging threats (like Log4j in 2021)? You mentioned applying SRE best practices in detection and response, and overall in securing the Google Cloud products. How does Google balance high reliability and operational excellence with the needs of detection and response (D&R)? How does Google decide which data sources and tools are most critical for effective D&R? How do we deal with high volumes of data? Resources: EP215 Threat Modeling at Google: From Basics to AI-powered Magic EP117 Can a Small Team Adopt an Engineering-Centric Approach to Cybersecurity? Podcast episodes on how Google does security EP17 Modern Threat Detection at Google EP75 How We Scale Detection and Response at Google: Automation, Metrics, Toil Google SRE book Google SRS book
--------
25:44
--------
25:44
EP232 The Human Element of Privacy: Protecting High-Risk Targets and Designing Systems
Guest: Sarah Aoun, Privacy Engineer, Google Topic: You have had a fascinating career since we [Tim] graduated from college together – you mentioned before we met that you’ve consulted with a literal world leader on his personal digital security footprint. Maybe tell us how you got into this field of helping organizations treat sensitive information securely and how that led to helping keep targeted individuals secure? You also work as a privacy engineer on Fuschia, Google’s new operating system kernel. How did you go from human rights and privacy to that? What are the key privacy considerations when designing an operating system for “ambient computing”? How do you design privacy into something like that? More importantly, not only “how do you do it”, but how do you convince people that you did do it? When we talk about "higher risk" individuals, the definition can be broad. How can an average person or someone working in a seemingly less sensitive role better assess if they might be a higher-risk target? What are the subtle indicators? Thinking about the advice you give for personal security beyond passwords and multi-factor auth, how much of effective personal digital hygiene comes down to behavioral changes versus purely technical solutions? Given your deep understanding of both individual security needs and large-scale OS design, what's one thing you wish developers building cloud services or applications would fundamentally prioritize about user privacy? Resources: Google privacy controls Advanced protection program
Cloud Security Podcast by Google focuses on security in the cloud, delivering security from the cloud, and all things at the intersection of security and cloud. Of course, we will also cover what we are doing in Google Cloud to help keep our users' data safe and workloads secure.
We’re going to do our best to avoid security theater, and cut to the heart of real security questions and issues. Expect us to question threat models and ask if something is done for the data subject’s benefit or just for organizational benefit.
We hope you’ll join us if you’re interested in where technology overlaps with process and bumps up against organizational design. We’re hoping to attract listeners who are happy to hear conventional wisdom questioned, and who are curious about what lessons we can and can’t keep as the world moves from on-premises computing to cloud computing.
Listen to Cloud Security Podcast by Google, All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg and many other podcasts from around the world with the radio.net app
New Zealand