Cloud attack emulation is a novel approach for continuously validating security posture by proactively testing enterprise security strategies' people, processes, and technology aspects.
This talk provides deep insights into the effective adoption of cloud attack emulation and how the approach enables threat-informed defense. With cloud security mechanisms increasingly overwhelmed by the fast-evolving cyberattacks, organizations must adopt practical cyber resilience to move from preventing attacks to quick detection, response, and recovery.
Cloud attack emulation allows for a holistic approach to overcome the fundamental causes of successful cyberattacks and exposes security blind spots. Cloud security operations teams significantly benefit from reducing alert fatigue by adopting attack emulation, which allows them to sift signals from noise while enhancing their technical skills and operational processes.
Interview:
What key takeaways can attendees expect from your InfoQ Dev Summit session?
The audience will clearly understand cloud attack emulation - why, when, and how it should be practiced.
What's the focus of your work these days?
There is a gap between the actual security posture and what security tools provide. This gap often results in a false sense of security and ultimately leads to successful attacks. My work allows organizations to continuously identify and close this gap, thus reducing the chances of successful attacks. Interestingly, attacks now target security tools to further create a false sense of security for defenders.
What technical aspects of your role are most important?
Continuously understanding the most pervasive attacks and threat actors employing them and translating them into attack emulations that organizations can safely orchestrate against their cloud infrastructure to grasp of the attacks' impact and countermeasures.
How does your InfoQ Dev Summit Munich session address current challenges or trends in the industry?
My session will touch on Responsible AI and how to leverage attack emulation for AI Red teaming. The proliferation of GenAI is introducing massive security and ethical concerns. However, most organizations are not equipped to deploy GenAI responsibly. Cloud attack emulation tackles this challenge by providing organizations with AI Red teaming capabilities.
How do you see the concepts discussed in your InfoQ Dev Summit Munich session shaping the future of the industry?
Cloud attack emulation would play a huge role in democratizing AI Red teaming, especially for cloud GenAI workloads. We see providers like AWS launching GenAI cloud services; these will increase in the following years and become more attractive for organizations looking to leverage GenAI cheaply and effectively. However, these cloud providers don't cater to GenAI's security and safety per the shared responsibility model. Cloud attack emulation would address this gap.
Speaker
Kennedy Torkura
CTO/Co-Founder @Mitigant, 5x AWS Community Builder, A Pioneer of Security Chaos Engineering, Instigator of Cyber Resilience Engineering & Threat-Informed Defense
Kennedy is the CTO/Co-Founder at Mitigant, an innovative cloud security startup based in Germany. Kennedy has spent over 12 years in cybersecurity and passionately explores the intersection of security chaos engineering, cyber resilience, incident response, and risk analysis for cloud security. Kennedy has published over 20 academic papers about several cloud security domains and contributed to the first O'Reilly book on Security Chaos Engineering. He is also a fourth-time member of the AWS Community Builder Program. He has spoken at international conferences, including KubeCon (Cloud Native Security Day), NDC {Security}, ChaosCarnival, and BSides Berlin.
