What asset management (ITAM) looks like outside cybersecurity - Danny Jenkins, Ed Skoudis, Jeremy Boerger, Maor Bin - ESW #374

Security Weekly Podcast Network (Audio)

The top priority on the CIS Critical Security Controls list has never changed: inventory and control of enterprise assets. Yet it remains one of the most challenging controls to implement, much less master. The refrain, "you can't secure what you don't know about" is as old as information security itself.

Complicating this task is the fact that improving asset management isn't an aspiration unique to the security team. IT, finance, facilities, and other groups within large enterprises are concerned with this as well. This often leads to challenges: should all these groups attempt to standardize on one common asset database or CMDB? Or should security go their own way, and purchase their own asset management tool?

Answering these questions would be a lot easier if we had someone with an IT asset management (ITAM) perspective, and fortunately, we do! Jeremy Boerger of Boerger Consulting joins us to help us understand the IT perspective, so we can understand if there are opportunities for security and IT to help each other out, or at least find some common ground!

Boerger Consulting Resources:

• Email newsletter
• LinkedIn newsletter
• Book page
• Amazon book page

I often say that it isn't the concepts or ideas in cybersecurity that are bad, but the implementations of them. Sometimes the market timing is just wrong and the industry isn't ready for a particular technology (e.g. enterprise browsers). Other times, the technology just isn't ready yet (e.g. SIEMs needed better database technology and faster storage). Since the ideas are solid, we see these concepts return after a few years.

Application allowlisting is one of these product categories. Threatlocker has been around since 2017 and is now a late stage startup that has achieved market fit. We chat with the company's CEO and founder, Danny Jenkins to find out how they learned from the mistakes made before them, and differentiate from the technology some of us remember from the late 2000s and early 2010s.

Segment Resources:

• ThreatLocker Solutions

This segment is sponsored by ThreatLocker. Visit https://securityweekly.com/threatlocker to learn more about them!

In this interview, Maor Bin, CEO and Co-Founder of Adaptive Shield, discusses the evolving landscape of SaaS Security. He highlights the challenges posed by the security gap resulting from the rapid adoption of SaaS applications and why SaaS security is beyond just misconfiguration management.

Segment Resources: https://www.adaptive-shield.com/landing-page/the-annual-saas-security-survey-report-2025-ciso-plans-and-priorities/

This segment is sponsored by Adaptive Shield. Visit https://securityweekly.com/adaptiveshieldbh to download the Annual SaaS Security Survey Report!

Cybersecurity professionals are often confronted with ethical dilemmas that need to be carefully navigated. In 25 years of teaching incident handling and penetration testing, Ed has often been asked by his students for help in ethical decision-making. Ed will share some of their questions and his recommended approaches for addressing them. Ed also has a new book out, The Code of Honor, about cybersecurity ethics. All proceeds go to scholarships for college students.

Segment Resources: 1) Ed's book, published June 18, 2024: https://www.amazon.com/Code-Honor-Embracing-Ethics-Cybersecurity/dp/1394275862/ref=sr11?crid=1DSHPCXDIQ1VT&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.rmZX2-3mj1nI74iKkjbKkQSNKCuRjjn-QQ8qrzVy21tMRAXuKu5Qr5rPgtszkVd7zJMV7oVTuImUZIxMQfecnaRlNRfAVI5G7azyWi8lY.WHOujvlsQXPTJaHuEafwRC2WVKZe474eVXHn46kLiEY&dib_tag=se&keywords=skoudis&qid=1722767581&sprefix=skoudis%2Caps%2C90&sr=8-1

2) Holiday Hack Challenge - sans.org/holidayhack

Visit https://www.securityweekly.com/esw for all the latest episodes!

Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/esw-374