Outthinking a hacker with Ted Harrington

In this conversation, Ted Harrington, Executive Partner at Independent Security Evaluators (ISE) shares his career journey and perspectives with Sivaguru on various topics related to IT security and ethical hacking. He talks about

• His company of ethical hackers helping other companies secure their IT systems
• Wanting to be an entrepreneur and starting a consumer facing business
• Moving to a company, as the CEO / founder wanted to mentor someone and felt that would be a good experience
• With that experience, feeling the need to serve businesses rather than consumers directly
• How he met his current business partner and how the plan for the company evolved literally overnight
• His four core principles: do hard things, do things that matter, do things in the service of others and to get better every single day
• Applying these principles in the security business and getting a client
• Mindset needed for outhinking a hacker
• Thinking like a hacker and why it may not be possible to think one step ahead of the attacker
• Developing the skill of thinking ‘evil’, to raise the security levels of our solutions
• Whose job it is to think security in a team
• How security is a leadership issue
• How security thinking can be used to ensure the adherence to company values such as customer experience, quality etc.
• Using security as a business differentiator and gain competitive advantage
• His thoughts on security aspects of the ‘supply chain’
• Zero trust and defense in depth models
• How not to become obsessed and become a pessimist, thinking only of all bad things that can happen
• How he likes to look at systems in everything and how they could be improved by breaking them
• How he approached writing his book that is related to technology, when technology is changing very fast
• How to make security layers least obtrusive
• What it takes to become a security professional

Ted Harrington is the #1 best selling author of HACKABLE: How to Do Application Security Right.

He’s helped hundreds of companies fix tens of thousands of security vulnerabilities, including Google, Amazon, and Netflix.

Ted has been featured in more than 100 media outlets, including The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, and Forbes.

His team founded and organizes IoT Village, an event whose hacking contest is a three-time DEF CON Black Badge winner. He hosts the Tech Done Different podcast.

Reach him at: ted [at] tedharrington [dot] com or https://tedharrington.com