Presentation Material
Abstract
This session will look at CISO initiatives such as vendor consolidation, automation, and attack surface management, to see if it’s possible to achieve both increased security maturity and decreased operational load. The talk will cover common mistakes when adopting security technologies, including the pros and cons of AI, and how to better collaborate together.
AI Generated Summary
The presentation examined the challenge of improving security maturity without increasing operational burden, arguing that traditional approaches of adding point solutions have created unsustainable complexity. The speaker defined security maturity as a continuous journey across evolving attack surfaces, including legacy systems (e.g., servers, workstations), cloud workloads, SaaS applications, and network devices, noting that old threats like Conficker persist while new vectors emerge.
Key findings highlighted a “pyramidal” problem: deploying numerous overlapping technologies (e.g., multiple endpoint agents) increases detection capabilities but also exponentially raises operational load for analysis and response. Machine learning, while widely adopted, often generates excessive low-quality alerts, requiring more skilled personnel to triage. The constant evolution of attacker tactics, such as “living off the land” techniques and supply chain attacks, further strains resources.
The proposed solution centered on platform consolidation rather than point tools. An effective platform must combine two elements: comprehensive signal collection (reducing false negatives) and contextual correlation (integrating signals with environment-specific knowledge). Vendor consolidation was emphasized, as a single vendor with multiple integrated controls can better combine signals and reduce integration overhead compared to disparate tools. Open standards like the Open Cybersecurity Schema Framework (OCSF) were cited as enablers for signal integration.
Practical implications differed