On this episode of the Futurum Tech Webcast, host Shira Rubinoff is joined by Tanium‘s Melissa Bishoping, Director, Endpoint Security Research for a conversation on the latest cybersecurity trends and insights from the Tanium Converge Conference.
Their discussion covers:
- The evolving landscape of endpoint security and the challenges organizations face
- Key takeaways from the Tanium Converge Conference, including emerging cybersecurity technologies
- Strategies for enhancing organizational security posture in the wake of increasing cyber threats
- The role of endpoint management in securing the remote workforce
- Insights into future cybersecurity trends and directions in endpoint security research
Learn more at Tanium.
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Disclosure: The Futurum Group is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of The Futurum Group as a whole.
Transcript:
Shira Rubinoff: Hi, this is Shira Rubinoff. I am President of Cybersphere, a Futurum Group. I’m here with Melissa Bishoping from Tanium. Melissa, pleasure to be with you here today.
Melissa Bishoping: Absolute pleasure. My name is Melissa Bishoping, director of Endpoint Security Research at Tanium.
Shira Rubinoff: I want to hear about Tanium’s Guardian. So much talk around here about the conference, heard a lot of folks speaking about it. I’d love you to give an overview to our audience.
Melissa Bishoping: Tanium Guardian is the most impactful, most important work I think I have ever done in my career. This is something I’ve been really passionate about basically since I started at the company. So Guardian is curated intelligence by our team of experts, this group of brilliant individuals that I get to work with that help you make sense of what is the biggest, most severe vulnerability I need to worry about in my environment right now? And not just where is it, but we want to give you the packages, the content to actually go out there and fix those. As I said in one of my speeches earlier today, I want to save more Friday nights. I want to keep people at the office and be able to let them go home because they know They’ve tackled these issues.
Shira Rubinoff: There’s a lot of organizations out there, a lot of companies, a lot of solutions. They could identify they give visibility. They’re like, take this information, now we’ll fix it. So we’re saying, “Here it is, we’re going to give it to you and we’re going to fix it for you.” So it’s the multi-level approach that really solves, identifies and solves. Can you talk to that point a little more?
Melissa Bishoping: Absolutely. So I’ve worked in organizations before as an engineer myself, where I’m taking a report about vulnerabilities from maybe one system, and then I’m having to turn around and figure out how to fix it in another, what changes are available to me. And that burns a lot of valuable time in addition to, I’ve got to read an article, I’ve got to go read the vendor’s notes, I’ve got to actually understand the thing that I’m fixing. That’s a really valuable amount of time that you could be actually moving into that remediation phase instead and saving your team’s energy. And I think that’s really important. A lot of tools are really focused on, well, we can tell you what it is, and it’s a single punctuation. I have this dynamic extensible platform at my hands and the beauty of Guardian is that I get to use different pieces and components of it, and I get to orchestrate across it how we’re going to solve these. Because as a security expert, it doesn’t matter what a tool was designed for or how you normally use it. In a crisis, if it’s the right tool for the job and you need to put it to work,
Shira Rubinoff: Definitely gets it done. Every organization is not wondering if we’re going to be attacked, it’s when we’re going to be attacked. And obviously, being proactive in somebody’s cybersecurity stance is fruitful and not just being reactive, which in the past, that’s how most organizations said, “Let’s have our plan for when this happens.” But we need to step ahead of the game in the cyber security world to completely jump to that space. So can you talk to that point in terms of proactive cyber security approach?
Melissa Bishoping: It’s easy to talk on the points of we should be patching, we should be monitoring, we should be ensuring the health of our different tools in our security stack. But I also think that we need to move into more proactive threat hunting, and that’s how you get up the chain and maturing what you’re doing. Are you just looking at telemetry and basing visibility detection or have you got those bases covered so that you can start hunting for adversary behavior? And then you can start looking for new techniques as they’re emerging in the threat landscape. And I think that is what matures an organization into proactive or react.
Shira Rubinoff: So interesting, as we said, looking for new types of areas. It’s like let’s look for the patterns that kind of jump out at us. That’s not the case anymore.
Melissa Bishoping: I borrow a phrase from my husband. He says, “Always look for what’s dumb, different or dangerous.”
Shira Rubinoff: Nice.
Melissa Bishoping: If it sticks out, if it looks a little odd or if it makes you kind of tilt your head and go, “Is that supposed to be there?” It might be worth digging in. And when you have this amount of telemetry and data at your hands, literally at your fingertips, you can start looking for outliers. You can start making hypothesis-driven in searches of your own. And with a platform like Tanium, you then convert that into intelligence to hunt through your environment in real time looking for not only where do I see this right now, but I want to know if it comes back again or I want to see if it’s inherent. That is the definition of being proactive.
Shira Rubinoff: Excellent. Well, thank you so much for your insight, not just in Tanium, but into the whole area itself. And I always ask my interviewees for a cybersecurity tip for the audience. Everybody’s always scrambling. What is the first thing I need to do? What should I think about? And everybody has different perspectives and I’d love to hear it yours, and I know our audience would love to hear yours.
Melissa Bishoping: Hygiene basics are still an essential and everyone wants to immediately jump to the really fun parts of ninjas coming through with skylights that we all hear about. Get your basic IT hygiene fundamentals under control and get your telemetry lock down. And you’re going to be able to force multiply what your threat hunting teams and what your incident responders are able to do on that.
Shira Rubinoff: That’s great business advice. Melissa, what a pleasure speaking with you today.
Melissa Bishoping: Same to to you.
Shira Rubinoff: And I’m sure our audience really enjoy what you had to say. So thank you.
Melissa Bishoping: Well, appreciate it.
Shira Rubinoff: And thank you to our audience.
Author Information
Acclaimed cybersecurity researcher and advisor, Shira is a global keynote speaker and presenter, and expert media commentator. She joined The Futurum Group in February 2024 as President, Cybersphere.
