Student-led cybersecurity clinics are increasingly playing an essential role in strengthening the digital defenses of nonprofits, hospitals, municipalities, small businesses, and other under-resourced organizations in our communities while also developing a talent pipeline for cyber-civil defense. Sarah Powazek, Program Director - Public Interest Cybersecurity at the University of California, Berkeley Center for Long Term Cybersecurity (CLTC), sheds light on this important development. One of the highlights of the discussion was the recognition that the cybersecurity field is such a melting pot of different skill sets. In Sarah's words, "it's actually one of the biggest advantages we have; threats are changing every day. If we don't have folks from different backgrounds and different life experiences, we're really not going to be prepared; we're not going to be able to adapt."

Time Stamps

00:02 -- Introduction

01:46 -- Guest's Professional Highlights

04:35 -- Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity (CLTC) Initiatives

06:13 -- Training students

07:20 -- How do the cybersecurity clinics benefit students?

09:11 -- Resources for Non-Profits and Under-Privileged Organizations

11:01 -- Types of Clients for Student-Run Cybersecurity Clinics

11:42 -- Guidance to universities who want to create student-led cybersecurity clinics

14:29 -- Consortium of Cybersecurity Clinics

17:20 -- Not-technical roles in cybersecurity

18:46 -- Cybersecurity field is a melting pot of different skill sets

21:12 -- Different Cybersecurity Roles

23:32 -- Final Thoughts

Memorable Sarah Powazek Quotes/Statements

"Cybersecurity clinics are modeled after medical and law school clinics."

"We're running programs where students will learn how to provide a cybersecurity maturity assessment. We accept students from all different majors, at least at UC Berkeley, it's very interdisciplinary. They spend the first part of the course learning all about cybersecurity and about the basics, basic cyber hygiene, multi-factor authentication, regular patching schedules, incident response plans, etc."

"There isn't a real clear academic pathway into cybersecurity."

"One of the big student-run clinics is the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. They operate as a student club; the students train each other, create programming, and engage with the clients, and they operate year-round. They've got a really interesting model for clinics where they're working with clients, but the students are really the ones taking on that responsibility. And the faculty advises them."

"We have a toolkit on the Consortium's website that actually has step-by-step instructions on how to design a clinic. How do you pick out the curriculum? "

"There's a couple of things that we really encourage folks to have, if they want to start up a clinic program, the first is a faculty champion."

"So we've really switched the focus and formed the consortium a number of years ago around centralizing resources, making it easier for folks around the country to start up programs, making the programs even better and more effective at both training students and providing real value to clients. And we have a goal of having a clinic in every state by 2030."

"I think that there are many people worldwide who care about the mission and protecting their communities but haven't gotten some of those skills yet. And anyone can learn. Anyone can learn cybersecurity. I truly believe that, I think people from all backgrounds provide something really valuable to the field."

"Cybersecurity is really a trade. It's something that anyone can learn."

"I'm starting to meet a lot of...

Developing and maintaining resilient and secure data centers is a huge part of cybersecurity readiness. Spiros Liolis, Chief Technologist and Managing Consultant, EYP Mission Critical Facilities, Part of Ramboll, joins me to discuss the challenges and best practices of creating and maintaining state-of-the-art data centers. Topics covered include a) elements and attributes of resilient data centers, b) creating and maintaining a resilient and adaptive data center, and c) the different types of risks – geological, meteorological, and human – that must be considered when building and maintaining the data centers.

Time Stamps

00:02 -- Introduction

00:49 -- Setting the Stage and Context for the Discussion

01:54 -- Guest's Professional Highlights

02:56 -- Overview of Data Center Resiliency

05:41 -- Criticality of Data Centers

07:53 -- Key Elements of a Resilient Data Center

12:06 -- Build Your Own or Co-locate

15:00 -- Assessing the Effectiveness of a Data Center

19:32 -- Significance of Simulated Exercises/Tabletop Exercises

21:46 -- Importance of On-Site Visits

23:56 -- Technical, Commercial and Operational Due Diligence

26:17 -- Adaptive Design

28:32 -- Data Center Facility Locations

30:15 -- Best Practices & Final Thoughts

Memorable Spiros Liolis Quotes/Statements

"Everything we do today, as professionals and as consumers, relies heavily on data centers."

"There's a cloud of course, but nothing up there, 35,000 feet above the ground, is hosting servers. The cloud is practically data centers on Earth, right."

"What do we mean by secure and resilient data centers? will refer to the ability of essential data center infrastructure to withstand and recover from disruptions and ensure their continued operations."

"When we talk about potential threats, we need to think of them in terms of geological, meteorological, accidental, or even intentional risks. These are primarily the risk types we talk about when it comes to data center resiliency."

"The moment you power up a data center, you practically cannot shut it down."

"So the resiliency of a data center must consider how to build enough redundancy by design and by implementation into these data centers."

"So our methodology is to look at the different risk factors that may have an impact on the facility itself, whether it is your own, or whether it is being hosted; you need to evaluate, and measure the impact of different risks and these are geological risks, meteorological risks and human risks, whether accidental or unintentional."

"Nothing beats an on-site visit to check a data center's resiliency."

"So the hybrid design is really all about building the necessary critical infrastructure that capitalizes on multiple sources of energy."

"Education awareness is absolutely paramount. And that is probably one of our faults as well, data centers today are considered to be the naughty neighbors. I mean, they say, Oh, they're energy consuming, they take our water, they take our power; we as an industry need to educate our communities, we need to tell them what is it that we do. And of course, we need to make sure that we build them in a sustainable way, we'll use renewables, we will become community friendly. All of that must happen."

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Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) play a vital role in modern software development, enabling the integration of services and facilitating the exchange of information. The ubiquity of APIs is a testament to their success in supporting many functions. However, their prominence has also made APIs a target for cyberattacks. Jeremy Snyder, Founder & CEO of Firetail.io, joins me in discussing how to secure APIs effectively. Our discussion revolves around the following questions:

What do we need APIs for? Why do we need API security? What are the consequences of lax API security?

What are the risks of APIs today? How can we remedy current API security issues?

Time Stamps



00:02 -- Introduction

00:49 -- Setting the Stage and Context for the Discussion

02:26 -- Guest's Professional Highlights

04:37 -- Overview of APIs

09:12 -- Common API Security Risks and Vulnerabilities

12:29 -- Design with security in mind

13:23 -- Securing APIs

13:36 -- Integrating Security into the Development Process

13:52 -- Different Ways of Security Testing APIs

17:08 -- Vulnerability Monitoring and Promptly Acting on Alerts

19:22 -- Role of Humans in Acting on Vulnerability Alerts

21:33 -- Staying on the Right Side of the Law

23:37 -- Significance of Maintaining Logs

25:36 -- Selecting Robust APIs

27:59 -- Key Takeaways

28:57 -- API Governance

30:25 -- Zero Trust Approach

32:10 -- Use of APIs in Leveraging Large Language Models (AI)

33:41 -- API Governance and Taking Ownership

36:12 -- Final Thoughts

Memorable Jeremy Snyder Quotes/Statements

"Application Programming Interface (API) -- It's basically the way two pieces of software talk to each other, that can be to send data from system A to system B, or that can be for system A to request system B to process something for it."

"We've got sensitive data crossing the wires over an API, but we've also got critical business functions like processing credit card transactions over an API."

"API's are pretty much happening behind the scenes, they enable a huge volume of interactions and transactions every day."

"So we've been cataloging the API data breaches for the last couple of years, these breaches go back about a decade or started about a decade ago, or let me say started to be recognized about a decade ago. And as we've catalogued them, we've kind of categorized them as well, to try to understand in each of these breach scenarios, what was the primary error or breach vector? How was the API breached? And if there's a secondary cause, or things like that, we look at that as well. Two of the main things that we see are are really authentication and authorization."

"Authorization turns out to be the number one root cause of data breaches around API's. And this has been true for many years now."

"Proactive security is always much cheaper than reactive security."

"From the proactive standpoint, the number one thing that any provider of an API can do is actually just check the API's before they go live."

"You should actually pen test your API's before they go live."

"Very often, we find that API's get shipped into production environments without going through either the static code analysis, or the pre launch testing."

"The average time that a vulnerability existed in a production environment before being patched and updated, was around 180 days."

"The best practice that we recommend to customers about reacting to the logs or the alerts or the suspicious conditions that you're seeing in your logs