Incident Ready: Dr. Kevin Tham's Strategies for Cryptography in Cybersecurity Response

This episode features an interview with Dr. Kevin Tham. Kevin is a CISO leader in the Australian Digital Banking sector and a seasoned information security veteran in the financial services industry. Most recently, he served as CISO at etika, a purpose-driven lender. And on this episode, Kevin and host Tim Chase discuss cryptography including how it’s changed over the last 25 years, and how quantum computing and AI will affect it. They also discuss handling cybersecurity incidents from first steps to when to notify the board.

Key Quotes

*”I think a lot of people focus on who's the nation status [in the event of an incident.] For me, I just need to know enough; what the motivation is for this particular attacker. Then it actually very quickly tells you what that next step is or what that one step plus one is so that you can actually hit them off and cut it off from a containment perspective.”

*”If you have an open source intelligence platform that is based on an LLM on a backend, for example, and it starts taking all this information that's on the internet and understanding cipher systems on websites and stuff. Then it becomes a very interesting sort of platform to go, ‘Okay. awesome platform, tell me which website has the TLS 1. 1 that's still running, etc. And it becomes really interesting because ‘someone's’ doing the job for you.”

*”If [an incident] hits a certain severity, absolutely, the CEO needs to come in. And the comms team needs to be part of that team so that you can shorten communication between the decision maker. and the action that needs to be taken. So it's a bit fluid in the sense, in that sense, but, you know, for me, it's more about how do I shorten any communications about decisions made versus what needs to be done.”

Time Stamps

[0:44] Introducing CISO leader Dr. Kevin Tham

[5:01] Kevin on cryptography

[7:21] How has cryptography changed over the years?

[10:27] How does quantum computing affect cryptography?

[15:44] How will AI affect cryptography?

[19:09] What’s Kevin’s action plan in the event of a security incident?

[26:21] Who’s in the response team?

[28:21] At what point do you need to notify the board of a security incident?

Links

Connect with Kevin on LinkedIn

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