CyberWire Daily - Steve Benton: Mixing like a DJ. [VP] [Career Notes]

Episode Date: May 14, 2023

Steve Benton, Vice President at Anomali Threat Research & GM Belfast, sits down to share his story as a cybersecurity expert with a surplus of strategic leadership experience across cyber and physical security rooted in substantial operational directorship and accountability. Steve shares his beginnings, where he wanted to grow up to be a rockstar, slowly moving into the world of tech with his first ever computer and falling in love with it. After graduating from Queens University with a degree in information technology, he joined British Telecommunications or BT, where he got to put his new found skills to use. Steve mentions how his job is kind of like being a DJ almost and says " a typical day for me is looking at the intelligence that we're bringing in, mixing it as it were to think of a slight, like DJs with a set of headphones on creating the right kind of mixes of intelligence for our clients." We thank Steve for sharing his story with us. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to the Cyber Wire Network, powered by N2K. and VPNs, yet breaches continue to rise by an 18% year-over-year increase in ransomware attacks and a $75 million record payout in 2024. These traditional security tools expand your attack surface with public-facing IPs that are exploited by bad actors more easily than ever with AI tools. It's time to rethink your security. Thank you. Learn more at zscaler.com slash security. Hi, I'm Steve Benton, and I'm vice president of anomaly threat research at Anomaly. I think I wanted to be a rock star when I was growing up, but unfortunately that couldn't happen. I do remember, however, my first experience in seeing a computer. It was a computer that you built yourself and had one cave memory in it. And it was a friend of my brother's brought it round to our house.

We had to sit it on a metal tray because it got so hot when it was plugged in. And I just remember writing a program that moved the dots across the screen and thinking, that's just incredible. And that just began kind of a love for technology. And really, I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life until I got my fingers on a keyboard. And I don't know know it was love. I talked about being a rock star you can realize I was a bit of a rebel as a teenager so what I

used to do was sneak into the computer room before class and I used to put little program bombs onto the computer so they would randomly kick off during class, making stupid noises out of the sound chip, which I got thrown out of the class for doing because I wasn't taking the subject seriously enough. So I actually studied myself through the curriculum, submitted my end of year project, et cetera., and came out with a straight A. And my computer science teacher said, there is no justice in this world. And he's right, there really isn't. So I think that underlined my actual passion,

that I would be committed enough to study myself, even as a rebellious youth, in order to get the qualification I cared about. order to get the qualification I cared about. Well, I studied information technology at Queen's University, a very interesting degree because it was a mixture of computer science and software engineering, along with electrical engineering. So I came out of there as a software engineer, and I joined British Telecommunications in their research labs writing real-time software. So the first thing I wrote actually was a telephone banking application which allowed people to interact with their bank accounts using speech.

And that was a real sort of groundbreaking pilot piece of technology that we were doing with a large bank here in the UK. So I started as a software engineer. I then moved into sort of software design and then moved on into delivery management. And then interestingly, the whole dot-com boom kicked off. And at that time, organizations wanted to be an internet service provider, an ISP, because it gave them intimacy with their customer base.

I sort of realized that so much of what we were doing as individuals was now going online. And it wasn't long before I rubbed shoulders with cybersecurity people. And then I got really interested in the whole aspects of cybersecurity and how, you know, what was a great benefit to society could be used for criminality or worse. And just wanting to be part of how do we protect ourselves better? How do we continue to have the benefits of getting more and more involved in this digital world,

but not at the risk to ourselves or the risk of society and how to be on the side of the good guys? on the side of the good guys. What takes up a lot of my time is looking at the vast swathes of intelligence that are out there, because what I recognized in my role at BT, where I was chief security officer, was that knowing the enemy, as well as you need to know yourself, was absolutely fundamental. And so as I came off the operational role with BT and joined Anomaly, I did it for the sake of how do we get the right intelligence into the hands of more people so that they can understand what they're up against. So a typical day for me is looking at the intelligence that we're bringing in,

mixing it as it were, because I think of it like DJs with a set of headphones on, creating the right kind of mixes of intelligence for our clients. So it's a very exciting place, to be honest, as you're looking at how to really accelerate the ability for organizations to keep pace with the security threats and know that they've actually got the grip on their security posture and are doing their very, very best to protect their organizations. You have to handle adversity in the same way you handle success. Both of these things are things to

learn from. Now, in the midst of the adversity, those can be very hard hours to put in. But I think that's where, you know, what you've built in terms of a team, in terms of everybody looking out for one another, is really important. And sometimes, you know, we'd be in extremely stressful situations where this bad thing's happening, but you're not yet clear on the full extent. And the pressure is growing and growing. And at the end of the day you may not come out 100% clean on this there is going to be some level of harm what you've got to focus on on what you can do what you can control and you know be open with your communication so you're bringing people with you on the journey and I think that kind of honesty and and you're

indicating to everyone that you're going to communicate clearly and I think that kind of honesty and indicating to everyone that you're going to communicate clearly and honestly means that people enlist with you, recognising that we are all in this together and we will all come out of this together. And that's the best way to come through adversity, not on your own but with a team and with a wider organisation that knows that team is doing the very best they can do. I am very much a supportive leader. I think greatness comes from a team that's comfortable with one another. That's a team that knows that whether we succeed or fail we learn equally from both and that

nobody comes to work in order to do something wrong everyone comes to work to give it their best and that's all I ever ask of my team is we come in each day to do our best we'll learn every step of the way my role as a leader is to ensure that my people have everything they need in order to do a great job and go home each day feeling good about what they've done and looking forward to the next day. I would like people to look back that I made a difference

in the way that we approached security in achieving the grip on the threat landscape and the grip on our security posture. That working with me was a place that you could innovate, that you could think of new ways to do things, and you would find that you had a leader that would support you to do so. And what I do find about our community here in security is we do build those long-term friendships. You build friendships through adversity, through the hard times and the good times. So I know that when I do, you know, hang up my hat, hang up my boots,

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