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

The Future of Security Operations

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 [email protected]

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