Name: SANS Cyber Leaders Podcast - The Cyber Battlefield with Max Smeets
Start: 2025-06-27T05:33:00Z
End: 2025-06-27T05:33:45.000Z
Location: BrightTALK
Rating: 3

What’s New in Cyber Security?
Find out by catching up on SANS Cyber Security Webcasts! Learn the latest trends, threats, and tactics from industry experts.

With the breadth of technologies in use across many enterprise organizations today, security analysts need more visibility than ever. There’s a real need for security operations centers (SOCs) to ingest more data, driving teams toward more unified platforms and intelligent automation for detection and response. 

Join SANS Analyst Dave Shackleford and Palo Alto Network on July 31st at 01:00 pm ET for a deep dive into Palo Alto Network’s XSIAM platform, which has been designed from the ground up to meet these requirements. They will dig into how AI/ML can help to prioritize threats, streamline investigations, and accelerate response. XSIAM can ingest, distill, and correlate a vast array of data sources, and execute contextual detection and response playbooks to help SOC teams automate incident remediation. In addition, they’ll cover:
• How SmartScore enables risk-based prioritization.

• Using Cortex Copilot to sharpen analyst focus.

• How continuous learning loops improve incident resolution outcomes over time. 

This session will break down how automation and AI are being operationalized with security teams today. 
If you're working to modernize your SOC, reduce alert fatigue, and gain more value from your data and tooling, this session will deliver practical insights grounded in real-world use cases.

AI-Driven SecOps: Unifying Controls, Automating Response, and Advancing the Modern SOC using Palo Alto Network’s XSIAM

In today's rapidly evolving cybersecurity landscape, organizations must prioritize the development and enhancement of their security capabilities to protect sensitive data and maintain regulatory compliance.

SANS training has emerged as a critical component in achieving these goals, offering comprehensive, hands-on training that addresses technical gaps, improves incident response capabilities, and supports career pathing and skill development.

We invite you to join us for this webinar, where IDC and SANS analysts will discuss the results of a recent research project that quantified the business value of training. Speakers will cover the changing market for security training, and examine how training can benefit hiring, improve incident detection and remediation, reduce system downtime, foster team collaboration, and more.

 

To explore the full findings and insights, download the IDC Whitepaper The Business Value of SANS: https://www.sans.org/u/1CBU.

For additional opportunities to learn from SANS experts, view our library of upcoming and on-demand webinars: https://www.sans.org/u/1CBZ.

Improving Security Outcomes with Skilled Practitioners: Realizing the Business Value of SANS Institute Security Training

In this episode, Ciaran and James sit down with Tarah Wheeler, scholar, campaigner and entrepreneur, to discuss risk, safety and security in an increasingly unstable digital world.

SANS Cyber Leaders Podcast - Translating Cyber Risk for a Chaotic World with Tarah Wheeler

Kicking off series two, Ciaran and James sit down with none other than the CIO of NATO, Manfred Boudreaux-Dehmer, to discuss what collective defense means in the cyber domain.

SANS Cyber Leaders Podcast - The Fifth Domain: NATO’s Cyber Frontline with Manfred Boudreaux-Dehmer

In this episode, Ciaran and James meet Christine Gadsby, Vice President and CISO at BlackBerry, to talk supply chain security; from exploding pagers to software liabilities.

SANS Cyber Leaders Podcast - Securing the Supply Chain with Christine Gadsby

In this episode, Lisa Forte, founder of Red Goat, joins Ciaran and James to discuss risk, security and the threat from within.

SANS Cyber Leaders Podcast - Insider Threat with Lisa Forte

In this episode, Ciaran and James are joined by Ross McKerchar, CISO at Sophos, to discuss one of the most significant – and to some, controversial – counter cyber operations ever carried out by a private company. Ross shares insights from the frontlines of the Pacific Rim campaign, as well as the shifting dynamics of the cybersecurity industry and what active defense really looks like in practice.

SANS Cyber Leader Podcast - Inside Pacific Rim with Ross McKerchar

Cybersecurity Myth Buster series by Rich Greene

Cybersecurity Myth Buster: You Need to be an Expert Hacker to Work in Cybersecurity

Cybersecurity Myth Buster: I'm Not a Target, So I Don't Need to Be Cybersecurity Aware

Cybersecurity Myth Buster: Cybersecurity is only for people in OT

GPTs (Generative Pretrained Transformers) based on Large Language Models are great for a lot of challenges. But they're not trained to find outliers within your log data.
In this brief, informative, and useful session, Christopher Crowley will discuss the concept of a variational autoencoder, then show how you could implement this to train an autoencoder based on your logs.
After training on your log information, you would then implement the concept to look for outliers within your log data, to surface weird things to analysts for review.
There will be about 20 minutes of theory, and about 30 minutes of practical demonstration using a jupyterlab notebook, python, and tensorflow.
Even if you're not a programmer, this will be a worthwhile session to understand what's possible with machine learning and your own log information.

Anomaly Detection within Machine Learning on Logs

Join us for this insightful webinar tailored to CISOs and security leaders looking to build and enhance a strong security culture within their organizations. In today’s evolving threat landscape, fostering a robust security culture is essential to protect business assets and maintain customer trust. This session will provide three practical steps to align your cybersecurity strategy with your organization’s mission, vision, and values. When this is in place, you can create a culture that sees security as a business enabler and not just a cost center.

Our discussion will cover:
- Understand how to define and assess your security culture.
- Learn how to align security initiatives with your company mission.
- Discover how to improve leadership buy-in and embed security

Don’t miss out on this opportunity to gain insights from experienced cybersecurity leaders and walk away with a clear, actionable plan to improve your organization’s security culture.

A CISO’s Guide to Improving Their Security Culture

Artificial intelligence has become the latest buzz word in our modern society, with many people and organizations not actually understanding what AI actually is or what it can actually be used for. AI is an incredibly powerful tool, which, in the hands of somebody who understands how to use it, can give them a significant advantage in the field of cyber crime. Cyber criminals have begun to make extensive use of artificial intelligence to assist them in their criminal activities. One area we see this taking place is in social engineering as an initial attack vector, where attackers using artificial intelligence are leveraging off these capabilities to craft incredibly convincing phishing attacks allowing them to gain that initial foothold into a network. This talk will look at how attackers are actually making use of artificial intelligence to attack organizations through social engineering attacks, and what organizations can do to try and actually address these threats.

AI & Cybercrime: How Criminals Are Weaponizing AI

Annual penetration testing is no longer enough to keep pace with modern threats. But what does continuous penetration testing (CPT) really mean, and how are organizations adopting it today? Join SANS Offensive Operations Curriculum Lead, Stephen Sims, as he leads this panel discussion with SANS instructors Chris Dale, Joshua Wright, and Erik Van Buggenhout on how CPT is helping to reshape offensive security, as well as its limitations.

The panel will explore how automation, real-time attack surface monitoring, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and adaptive testing strategies are influencing the industry, the challenges security teams face in implementation, and where continuous testing is headed next.

Whether you're a seasoned security professional or just beginning to explore offensive automation, this discussion will provide critical insights into the future of penetration testing.

Continuous Penetration Testing: Rethinking Offensive Security in an Ever-Changing Threat Landscape

The classic way to make a massive difference with technology, or “Dent in The Universe,” is via a startup. We can define a startup as a company with high growth possibilities that is innovative and potentially disruptive.

This describes most startups in the infosec space. Also, essentially every startup has a strong technology component today and infosec concerns.

This translates to lots of startup opportunities for infosec professionals, whether as a founder, early-stage employee, rank and file employee, or even investor.

In this talk we’ll discuss startups, including how important having a “great idea” may or may not be, funding options, as well as “exit” strategies.

Funding options include bootstrapping, which means using existing resources, starting a business without external help or capital. Angel investors, affluent individuals who provide capital for a startup, are another option, as are venture capitalists, and crowd sourcing.

An exit strategy is how illiquid assets like company ownership and stock are changed into liquid assets like cash. Even if you do not plan on exiting the company, you may want to convert some assets to cash. And of course, any investors will want their money back with profits at some point.

If you are focused on outcomes instead of inputs, a startup can be absolutely fantastic. If you are happy hacking more than just technology, but also happy to figure out and execute business concerns, such as hacking procedures and whatever it takes to make things work, a startup is an option to consider.

Getting Involved in a Startup: Make a Dent in The Universe

In an era where OT vendors are rapidly adapting to the cloud, we're at a pivotal moment to redefine how Owner/Operators can integrate these innovative cloud services into their OT infrastructures. In this webcast, Justin Searle—SANS Senior Instructor and author of the ICS410: ICS/SCADA Security Essentials™ course—shares practical configurations that can revolutionize your defensible architecture and strengthen your security posture. As Control #2 in the SANS Five ICS Cybersecurity Critical Controls, Defensible Architecture is about more than just system design—it's about reducing agreed-upon risk while empowering human defenders.

Defensible Architectures for Cloud Connectivity

As the world of information technology continues to change, so does the role of the security leader. Whether you're a CISO, Director of Security, or someone aspiring for such a position, you should consider how the current trends in IT and business affect your professional journey.

Does your current approach to security leadership set you up for success? Attend this session to learn how experienced CISOs:

Align their security strategy to the business it aims to support
Ask the right questions to excel in challenging situations
Gain support of their efforts from non-security stakeholders
Use technical and communication skills to their advantage
Those of us whose professional roots are grounded in technology often look at enterprise defenses from the perspective of the threats. While understanding the relationship between attacks and defenses is important, it's no longer sufficient. Attend this session to learn how to think about the role of a modern security leader to succeed in today's business environment.

The Changing Role of a Security Leader and What It Means to You

In this episode, Ciaran and James meet Max Smeets, Co-Director of Virtual Routes and Senior Researcher at the Center for Strategic Studies at ETH Zurich, to discuss how digital threats are reshaping geopolitics.

SANS Cyber Leaders Podcast - The Cyber Battlefield with Max Smeets

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SANS Cyber Leaders Podcast - The Cyber Battlefield with Max Smeets

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SANS Institute