Barracuda’s Adam Khan on AI-driven XDR and plugging the cybersecurity skills gap

In this week’s episode of The Future of Security Operations podcast, Thomas is joined by Adam Khan. Adam is a cybersecurity and technology leader with over 25 years of experience working at Fortune 500 companies. He has a proven track record of building and managing global security teams, leading engineering, infrastructure, application, and product, and is currently VP of Global Security Operations at Barracuda.

Adam and Thomas discuss:

- Building discipline and resilience by working on SRE teams

- How a well-known DDoS attack changed his career path

- Using automation to reduce alert fatigue

- Strategies for plugging the security skills gap

- The potential of AI-driven XDR

- How cyber attacks are evolving in the age of AI

- Lessons learned from researching the history of cybersecurity

- Empowering teams to do their best work

- Creating a culture of continuous learning

The Future of Security Operations is brought to you by Tines, the smart, secure workflow builder that powers some of the world’s most important workflows. https://www.tines.com/solutions/security

Where to find Adam Khan:

Adam's website: https://www.adamkhancyber.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adamkhan-cyber/

Barracuda: https://www.barracudamsp.com/ and sales@barracudamsp.com

Where to find Thomas Kinsella: 

Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/thomasksec

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thomas-kinsella/

Tines: https://www.tines.com/

Resources mentioned:

2023 Global Cyber Threat Report by Adam Khan: https://www.adamkhancyber.com/post/2023-global-cyber-threat-report

Adam's five-part cybersecurity history series on smartermsp.com: https://smartermsp.com/author/akhan/

DarkReading: https://www.darkreading.com/

BleepingComputer: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/

In this episode:

[02:10] Switching from site reliability engineering (SRE) to SecOps

[03:40] How the DDoS attack on Amazon, eBay and Priceline in 2008 piqued his interest in security

[04:37] Building discipline and resilience by working on SRE teams

[09:05] Navigating Barracuda's acquisition of SKOUT

[10:22] How growing companies can benefit from a external XDR platform

[11:50] Prioritizing the alerts that matter most to customers

[13:03] Using automation to enrich threat intelligence and root out false positives

[14:50] The potential of AI-driven XDR

[16:40] How cyber attacks have evolved as adversaries use AI tools like FraudGPT and WormGPT

[19:30] Adam's three key takeaways from researching the history of cybersecurity

[23:20] Strategies for tackling the talent shortage

[25:15] Empowering teams to do their best work

[28:10] How Adam stay on top of the latest security trends

[31:35] The importance of making mistakes

[32:20] Promoting a culture of blameless incident reviews

[34:40] Predictions for the future

[35:50] Connect with Adam