Exposing the Latest Cloud Threats with Anna Belak

Anna Belak, Director of The Office of Cybersecurity Strategy at Sysdig, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss the findings in this year’s newly-released Sysdig Global Cloud Threat Report. Anna explains the challenges that teams face in ensuring their cloud is truly secure, including quantity of data versus quality, automation, and more. Corey and Anna also discuss how much faster attacks are able to occur, and Anna gives practical insights into what can be done to make your cloud environment more secure. About Anna
Anna 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 The Office of Cybersecurity Strategy 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 Global Cloud Threat Report: https://www.sysdig.com/2023threatreport duckbillgroup.com: https://duckbillgroup.com
Transcript

Announcer: 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. This promoted guest episode is brought to us by our friends over at Sysdig. And once again, I am pleased to welcome Anna Belak, whose title has changed since last we spoke to Director of the Office of Cybersecurity Strategy at Sysdig. Anna, welcome back, and congratulations on all the adjectives.

Anna: [laugh]. Thank you so much. It’s always a pleasure to hang out with you.

Corey: So, we are here today to talk about a thing that has been written. And we’re in that weird time thing where while we’re discussing it at the moment, it’s not yet public but will be when this releases. The Sysdig Global Cloud Threat Report, which I am a fan of. I like quite a bit the things it talks about and the ways it gets me thinking. There are things that I wind up agreeing with, there are things I wind up disagreeing with, and honestly, that makes it an awful lot of fun.

But let’s start with the whole, I guess, executive summary version of this. What is a Global Cloud Threat Report? Because to me, it seems like there’s an argument to be made for just putting all three of the big hyperscale clouds on it and calling it a day because they’re all threats to somebody.

Anna: To be fair, we didn’t think of the cloud providers themselves as the threats, but that’s a hot take.

Corey: Well, an even hotter one is what I’ve seen out of Azure lately with their complete lack of security issues, and the attackers somehow got a Microsoft signing key and the rest. I mean, at this point, I feel like Charlie Bell was brought in from Amazon to head cybersecurity and spent the last two years trapped in