Interesting Stories, Personalities, and Innovations in Cybersecurity

Grab your headphones and tune into Armorblox’s new podcast, Bloxcast.

As the CEO and Co-founder of Armorblox, you can imagine that DJ Sampath has plenty of insightful conversations with some of the most knowledgeable cybersecurity leaders on the planet. These behind-the-scenes conversations inspired the idea behind the podcast––to capture and share these unique stories and invaluable knowledge with others.

Cue Bloxcast––a podcast born to inform and entertain the cybersecurity community at large.

This podcast will focus on discussions with experts and tackle topics like how to keep pace with a quickly evolving threat landscape, how to build out a defense that’s right for your organization, and more.

The first few episodes of Bloxcast will focus on a series we’re calling “Interesting Stories, Personalities, and Innovations in Cybersecurity.” You’ll want to listen in as we chat with some of the most influential cybersecurity professionals and get their take on popular topics in email security and beyond.

Armorblox Chats with SAS and Microsoft

In our first Bloxcast episode, DJ has the pleasure of chatting with his guests Phil Montgomery, Brian Wilson, and Jessica Grube. As key members of some of the largest cybersecurity companies on the planet, his guests dive into unpacking the current state of affairs in cybersecurity. They touch on everything from the geopolitical landscape to best practices in end-user education.

Get To Know Our Guests

• Phil Montgomery is the General Manager of Security GTM at Microsoft and was formerly at Mandiant. Phil also spoke at Armorblox’s CONTEXT 2022 - RSAC edition event, sharing his take on some of the hottest topics in cybersecurity. If you missed it, catch it here.
• Brian Wilson is the Chief Information Security Officer at SAS with over 20 years of experience in Information Security and IT.
• Jessica Grube is the Security Operations Team Lead at SAS with over 7 years of experience in cybersecurity.

Our Episode Highlights

The conversation starts off with an overview of top-of-mind security threats we’re facing at the moment, most notably the Ukraine-Russian war.

“The Russian-Ukraine situation is something we’ve never seen before. We continue to reinforce diligence to our employees. We’re making sure they understand the different kinds of attacks that we are seeing. It’s one of the reasons that we have Armorblox.” —Brian Wilson, SAS

Brian shares insights into how he runs security operations at SAS, including his strategy and approach to building out an effective security stack. He speaks to exactly how his team strategically vets out technologies they can leverage to improve their security.

“We are always looking to complement the security technologies that we have in order to make them better. And that’s why we selected Armorblox because it integrated so well with our existing Microsoft technology… It’s nice to know that [Microsoft] is doing their part on the back-end… But when we want to dig deeper into the message, Natural Language Understanding is really the next best thing we can do. It helps us contextualize the messages and helps us better see what types of issues that are going to be cropping up with our employees.” — Brian Wison, SAS

It is reiterated throughout the conversation that end-user education and enablement are imperative to building out a holistic approach to email security within your organization. Security Operations is one of the most overworked teams across organizations. Both Brian and Jessica shared their views on how to look for technologies that can automate key workflows and most importantly how to improve security posture by integrating employees into the discussion and fight against cyberattacks.

“What’s nice about [the integration] is that we can continue to use some of the querying languages that we already use within Sentinel and just extend that to everything we are getting with the Armorblox integration as well. It's convenient for our team because it is a language we are already familiar with but it also ties into everything else. We plan to extend and grow that so that we can automate some of our responses as well. So when we do receive reports from a user of a phishing email or if something was detected that was confirmed to be malicious we can already have that automated, to go out, add the threats in, block anything we need, see if there are any users that interacted with it or clicked on it, and see if they were able to get there or not. It is a huge time saver for us.” —Jessica Grube, SAS

The conversation turns to the paradigm shift we’re witnessing in email security. With a rise in remote work, we’re seeing a move away from the reliance on on-premise SIEM to an entirely cloud-based SIEM approach. Jessica shares that SAS has made this change and currently relies on Microsoft Sentinel integrated with Armorblox for both enhanced security and easier threat remediation. Brian touches on how quickly the cybersecurity space evolves, with an importance placed on technologies that keep pace with the shifting landscape––such as Armorblox.

As the largest security vendor in the world, Microsoft has a long history of partnerships. This is something Phil attributes as the key to Microsoft’s success and longevity. We couldn’t agree more, Phil, and especially appreciate his sentiment that the answer to maintaining security is collaboration. As they say, it takes a village… and cybersecurity is no different.

“We need to keep the world secure. Every day I wake up, and my colleagues at Microsoft wake up to secure not just our customers but the rest of the world. And we know that we can't do it ourselves. We have to work with partners. We have to work with partners like Armorblox… That’s the answer to security, all of us working together.” — Phil Montgomery, Microsoft

Click here to listen and watch the full episode. And stay tuned for more episodes to come!