Behind Elttam: Matt Jones Discusses Infosec Innovations and Australia's Cybersecurity Landscape

Summary

In this episode, Cole Cornford chats with Matt Jones, co-founder of Elttam, an independent security boutique that provides security assessment services. On top of his role at Elttam, Matt is active in the infosec community in a variety of ways, including helping with BSides Canberra's call for papers and writing open-source tooling such as talkback.sh. Cole and Matt chat about the motivation behind founding Elttam, why Australia's infosec industry is lagging behind other parts of the world, the exploit development space, and plenty more.

Timestamps

2:00 - Matt's career background

7:00 - Matt's early challenges finding an opportunity in cybersecurity

11:00 - Why Matt chose to co-found Elttam

13:00 - Cole: Australia's infosec industry is immature compared to US

19:00 - The importance of specialisation

20:30 - Better to do 1 thing really well when bootstrapping

24:00 - Using the right approach for the right context

25:30 - Risks of using a bug bounty program

31:10 - Cole: the bar for pen testing reports should be much higher

37:10 - Training & education for infosec

39:00 - Cole: is infosec a cottage industry?

44:00 - Product vs service approach to cybersecurity

47:50 - Cole: I like looking at source code from 80s and 90s

49:00 - Rapid fire questions

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