Anna Belak, Director of the Office of Cybersecurity Strategy at Sysdig, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss the newest benchmark for responding to security threats, 5/5/5. Anna describes why it was necessary to set a new benchmark for responding to security threats in a timely manner, and how the Sysdig team did research to determine the best practices for detecting, correlating, and responding to potential attacks. Corey and Anna discuss the importance of focusing on improving your own benchmarks towards a goal, as well as how prevention and threat detection are both essential parts of a solid security program. About AnnaAnna has nearly ten years of experience researching and advising organizations on cloud adoption with a focus on security best practices. As a Gartner Analyst, Anna spent six years helping more than 500 enterprises with vulnerability management, security monitoring, and DevSecOps initiatives. Anna's research and talks have been used to transform organizations' IT strategies and her research agenda helped to shape markets. Anna is the Director of Thought Leadership at Sysdig, using her deep understanding of the security industry to help IT professionals succeed in their cloud-native journey. Anna holds a PhD in Materials Engineering from the University of Michigan, where she developed computational methods to study solar cells and rechargeable batteries.Links Referenced:
Sysdig: https://sysdig.com/

Sysdig 5/5/5 Benchmark: https://sysdig.com/555

TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I’m Corey Quinn. I am joined again—for another time this year—on this promoted guest episode brought to us by our friends at Sysdig, returning is Anna Belak, who is their director of the Office of Cybersecurity Strategy at Sysdig. Anna, welcome back. It’s been a hot second.Anna: Thank you, Corey. It’s always fun to join you here.Corey: Last time we were here, we were talking about your report that you folks had come out with, the, “Cybersecurity Threat Landscape for 2022.” And when I saw you were doing another one of these to talk about something, I was briefly terrified. “Oh, wow, please tell me we haven’t gone another year and the cybersecurity threat landscape is moving that quickly.” And it sort of is, sort of isn’t. You’re here today to talk about something different, but it also—to my understanding—distills down to just how quickly that landscape is moving. What have you got for us today?Anna: Exactly. For those of you who remember that episode, one of the key findings in the Threat Report for 2023 was that the average length of an attack in the cloud is ten minutes. To be clear, that is from when you are found by an adversary to when they have caused damage to your system. And that is really fast. Like, we talked about how that relates to on-prem attacks or other sort of averages from other organizations reporting how long it takes to attack people.And so, we went from weeks or days to minutes, potentially seconds. And so, what we’ve done is we looked at all that data, and then we went and talked to our amazing customers and our many friends at analyst firms and so on, to kind of get a sense for if this is real, like, if everyone is seeing this or if we’re just seeing this. Because I’m always like, “Oh, God. Like, is this real? Is it just me?”And as it turns out, everyone’s not only—I mean, not necessarily everyone’s seeing it, right? Like, there’s not really been proof until this year, I would say because there’s a few reports that came out this year, but lots of people sort of anticipated this. And so, when we went to our cu