Joining us from the fantastic vista of Monaco is Mark Arena. He’s the CEO at Intel 471 – and he has a great story to tell about the origins of the company name, Boots On the Ground! He also breaks down the ransomware threat over the last couple of decades and how they have evolved with the availability of new, faster, better technology as well as a business acumen in creating affiliate programs and Ransomware-as-a-Service.

This week Chris Krebs, founding partner of Krebs Stamos Group and the first Director of the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) joins the podcast this week. He shares insights on ransomware trend lines, policy discussions, and streamlining the government engagement process for the private sector.

This week Dragos CEO and co-founder Rob Lee joins the podcast and breaks down the Operational Technology (OT) challenge that many businesses are facing today including a lack of clarity on who within the business owns OT and defining what acceptable OT risk means within the business.

Dmitri Alperovitch is the Co-Founder and Executive Chairman of Silverado Policy Accelerator, a non-profit focused on advancing solutions to critical geopolitical and cybersecurity policy challenges. He is a Co-Founder and former CTO of CrowdStrike Inc. A renowned cybersecurity visionary and business executive, Alperovitch is a thought-leader on cybersecurity strategy and state tradecraft and has served as special advisor to the US Department of Defense.

Curtis Dukes, Executive Vice President and General Manager for Security Best Practices at the Center for Internet Security (CIS) joins the podcast this week. He shares insights from his more than 30 years with the NSA and how that journey led to the CIS and the synergies between the two organizations in providing cyber resources and fostering threat intelligence information sharing.

Dr. Andrew Hammond, Historian and Curator of the International Spy Museum joins us this week - and let’s be honest he has just about the coolest job out there today! Hammond takes us through the classic period of espionage and the reliance on physical data and spycraft techniques to transport through to the modern day battlefield of cyber intelligence and espionage.

Mike Watson, CISO for the Commonwealth of Virginia, joins the podcast this week and shares perspective on the challenges and opportunities for security teams at the state and local level. He recounts a 2009 ransomware incident and details just how sophisticated ransomware attackers have become in the ensuing years since.

This week we catch up with Matthew Ferraro an attorney at the international law firm Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr and former intelligence officer. He has written extensively on national security and legal issues and most recently authored the CNN opinion piece “Ransomware attacks are about to get worse. But there are ways to stop them.”

This week our special guest is Sudhakar Ramakrishna, President and Chief Executive Officer of SolarWinds. He shares insights from his first year at the company, joining at a very dynamic time as news of the Sunburst attack first started making headlines.

This week, we welcome guest Combiz Abdolrahimi, a national security lawyer and Emerging Technology and Innovation Leader at Deloitte. We deep dive into today’s critical infrastructure vulnerabilities and navigating the path forward to address the threat with systems that weren’t originally designed with cybersecurity in mind.