Transcript
A (0:00)
Welcome to the Proven podcast, where we don't care what you think, only what you can prove. Imagine your data being protected on the same levels of the United States Marine Corps and the FBI. That's what today's guest brings in. MK tells us all about risk assessments, how to protect our data in an ever evolving world, and how even with AI, you can remain safe. The show starts now. All right, welcome back to the show, MK I'm really excited to have you here.
B (0:24)
Excited to be here. Appreciate it, Charles.
A (0:26)
So for the four or five people on the planet who actually don't know who you are, can you kind of give a little debrief what you are, what you've done, how you got here?
B (0:33)
I'm sure there's more than four or five, but. MK Palmore, I'm a consulting leader of a firm called Apogee Global RMS. My career spans a career in government, 32 years in the US federal government. I'm a US Naval Academy graduate, United States Marine Corps officer. I then went on from the Marines to spend 22 years in the Federal Bureau of Investigation as a special agent, retired from the FBI, as an executive leading the largest cybersecurity team that the FBI has here in FBI San Francisco. And then I went on to work for two Fortune 500 companies, Palo Alto Networks, and a Fortune 5 company, Google Cloud, as essentially a field chief information security officer. So great experience working at the enterprise level and then broke off out on my own in order to support SMBs and the Global public sector through Apogee Global.
A (1:28)
So there's a lot to unpack there. And as much as I want to dive right into the intense stuff at the end of the enterprise and the SMB, let's kind of slowly get out there. We know that data is being hacked every day. We know that we have things that are being, be it WhatsApp or Signal or own personal stuff with identity being stolen across the board. The audience always going to ask me what is the first thing I can do right now? Like, okay, I get it. You've done this on the exceptionally high level. You've done it with the FBI. What is basic stuff that most people get wrong every single day when it comes to their data and their protection of what's going on in their world?
B (1:58)
It's the basic stuff. You know, apps will oftentimes come to you with default settings that make them easy for you to utilize. And that ease of use is what the adversary relies upon in order to gain access to your digital footprint and your private information. And So I would ask people to take that extra step. And that extra step is not hard. It just simply means enabling things like multi factor authentication and the applications that they use, or the SaaS applications, the portals for which they gain access to. It doesn't take that much time. People will deride things like SMS as the second factor for authentication, but some authentication is better than none at all. And so I would encourage people to, yes, utilize SMS if that's the only available resource that you have. But there are a number of authenticator apps out here now that use a higher level of encryption and provide codes for you to gain access to your email or applications. And that's probably at a baseline for consumers. One of the best things that you could be doing is just simply doing the basics. Make it harder for an adversary to gain access to your information. And then if you want to take a few extra steps, there are things like monitoring your background, your credit, all of those things. You can actually set it up in Google so that if your personal results happen to show in Google, they will send you an email saying that your personal results, like your address, are showing up on this particular website and you can go through a process to have that information removed. It's not that hard to do. And again, these are simple things that everyone should be doing in order to reduce their exposure and decrease the risk of their digital privacy being violated.
