What is old is new again: default deny on the endpoint - Danny Jenkins - ESW #402

2025-04-14

Default deny is an old, and very recognizable term in security. Most folks that have been in the industry for a long time will associate the concept with firewall rules. The old network firewalls, positioned between the public Internet and private data centers, however, were relatively uncomplicated and static. Most businesses had a few hundred firewall rules at most. The idea of implementing default deny principles elsewhere were attempted, but without much success. Internal networks...

Default deny is an old, and very recognizable term in security. Most folks that have been in the industry for a long time will associate the concept with firewall rules. The old network firewalls, positioned between the public Internet and private data centers, however, were relatively uncomplicated and static. Most businesses had a few hundred firewall rules at most.

The idea of implementing default deny principles elsewhere were attempted, but without much success. Internal networks (NAC), and endpoints (application control 1.0) were too dynamic for the default deny approach to be feasible. Vendors built solutions, and enterprises tried to implement them, but most gave up.

Default deny is still an ideal approach to protecting assets and data against attacks - what it needed was a better approach. An approach that could be implemented at scale, with less overhead. This is what we’ll be talking to Threatlocker’s CEO and co-founder, Danny Jenkins, about on this episode. They seemed to have cracked the code here and are eager to share how they did it.

This segment is sponsored by ThreatLocker. Visit https://www.securityweekly.com/threatlocker to learn more about them!

Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/esw-402

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