Transcript
A (0:00)
Foreign. Welcome to Coruscant Technologies, home of the Digital Executive podcast. Do you work in emerging tech? Working on something innovative? Maybe an entrepreneur? Apply to be a guest at www.corazon.com brand welcome to the Digital Executive. Today's guest is Dr. Ravi Kuran Nizampatnam. Dr. Ravi Karan Nizam Patnam is an internationally recognized expert in network security and enterprise cybersecurity architecture. With over a decade of sustained leadership protecting large scale mission critical digital infrastructure for globally integrated enterprises. His career reflects a rare combination of deep technical mastery, original innovation, scholarly contribution and demonstrable real world impact across regulated industries including finance, healthcare and data driven media platforms. Well, good afternoon Ravi. Welcome to the show.
B (1:02)
Thanks for having me. Good afternoon.
A (1:05)
Absolutely my friend. I appreciate it. You're healing out of Austin, Texas today. I'm in Kansas City, so we're in the same time zone. I appreciate that. I know sometimes it's hard to traverse these schedules, calendars and time zones. So thank you. And Robbie, jumping into your first question, you've spent over a decade securing mission critical global digital infrastructure across finance, healthcare and media. How has the threat landscape evolved during that time and what risks are enterprises still underestimating today?
B (1:35)
That's a great question. Thank you. The biggest shift I have seen over the last decade is that attackers no longer break in. I would say they simply log in. Earlier in my career, attackers were noisy, they were like. You would see the perimeter scans, you will see the attempts exploiting and you would see the malware signatures everywhere. But things changed today. Most major attacks don't like glitches at all. They don't look like glitches at all, they just look like a normal activity. You will see a valid user, a valid token, a trusted API call. What really changed is how we trust people and how we trust businesses. We have moved from perimeter attacks into the internal abuse that could be identity compromise, API misuse, or really a supply chain access. So the attacker's first goal is always no longer entry. It's persistence. Once they have their foot landed, they move quietly throughout our systems that were never designed to question internal trust. What enterprises still underestimate is how fragile we are. There are machine entities that are service accounts, there are CI CD pipelines, third party integrations, I mean you name it. We have more than dozens of systems that we interact every day. So organizations mostly obsess over malware detection. But it's simple credential that could cause lot of damage, the collateral movement. So the next decade of breaches won't come from like traditional exploits, but they come from over trusted or paths that were no longer revalidated. So that's the uncomfortable truth. So we just need to make sure that we bring our designs with much more defensive mechanism and our assumption should be challenged.
