October 31, 2023

It is always nice to occasionally get out of the trenches to look at the larger issues. Today, we sat down with Michael Mestrovich from Rubrik. He has decades of experience in three letter agencies and has a perspective that is hard to match when it comes to getting a handle on current trends in cybersecurity.
Michael gives a quick review of current trends in cybersecurity legislation. He notes that many have overlooked something as simple as the Internet of Things. IoT is projected to have as many as 30.9 billion endpoints by 2025.
Much of this technology is quickly placed without proper understanding of vulnerabilities. He suggests that much of it is in a deploy-and-forget type of implementation. This casual approach can drastically increase the attack surface for a federal agency.
"having spent a lot of time in the intelligence community in the intelligence community certainly struggles with this concept of information sharing"
Michael Mestrovich, Rubrik Tweet
Michael moves on to some of the current threats that are facing federal technology leaders. In order to get a grasp on what is prevalent, it is possible that people in the intelligence community may struggle with sharing information on threats.
When it comes to Artificial Intelligence, Michael thinks that it can have a positive impact on security when used in areas like automation.
Resilience is a term that is popular among leaders at the DoD; but it has application on civilian agencies as well. Rubrik has proved itself over the years in knowing how to gain visibility into a network and then having the ability to create immutable backups that are a good strategy at preventing malicious actors from planting code in backup copies.
If you enjoyed this article, you may want to listen to Ep. 97 Infrastructure Enabling Federal Innovation

John Gilroy
John Gilroy appeared on National Public Radio in Washington DC for 25 years. He wrote 523 technology columns for The Washington Post. Currently, John is an award-winning lecturer at Georgetown University. Forgot to mention — he has recorded over 1,000 podcast interviews.
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