“If an Attacker Is Able to Create an Exploit for Anything… They Get Everything. This Is the Tragedy of SolarWinds.”

Silo Busting 13: Zero-Trust Software with Alex Gounares and Sam Rehman

When Sun Tzu wrote: “All warfare is based on deception," he probably wasn’t thinking of the SolarWinds attack. But it seems like we might learn something about that recent event by studying his legendary text, The Art of War. Or so says Alex Gounares, CEO of Polyverse Corporation and our guest on the latest #CybersecurityByDesign episode of Silo Busting. Sun Tzu and the military talk about using decoys, says Gounares, and "cyber attackers use decoys all the time. And it works. It fooled World War II Germany with the decoys for the Calais invasion, it fooled in Confucian times, and it fools today in 2020.” If you don’t want to be fooled, you’ll attend—carefully—to what Gounares and Sam Rehman say in this spirited conversation. Gounares, who in a previous life was Bill Gates’ technological advisor, zeroes in on the extremely topical theme of zero-trust software. Says Gounares: “Zero trust is this idea of saying: Assume the world around you is messy.” Listening to these two veterans talk about micro-segmentation, entropy, and repeatability is an educational experience you won’t want to miss. Trust us.

Host: Alison Kotin
Engineer: Kyp Pilalas
Producer: Ken Gordon