Black Hat USA 2024 | MK Palmore

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M.K. Palmore

President of Cyversity & Director, Office of the CISO, Google Cloud

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Cybersecurity diversity: Harnessing AI and inclusive talent for proactive defense

Since bad actors are relentless in profiting from online exploits, leveraging cybersecurity diversity is crucial for defense against their attacks.As such, the cybersecurity industry must broaden its lens to include individuals from various backgrounds, not just traditional software developers. By doing so, the industry can tap into a wider talent pool, bringing in those who are passionate and inquisitive, with skills that can be taught and honed, according to MK Palmore (pictured), director of the Office of the CISO at Google Cloud.Google Cloud’s MK Palmore talks to theCUBE about the importance of cybersecurity diversity

play_circle_outline Importance of diversity in cybersecurity workforce and efforts by Cyversity.

play_circle_outline Impact of AI, generative AI, and public-private partnerships on cybersecurity.

play_circle_outline Mandiant acquisition by Google and its impact on cybersecurity offerings.

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MK Palmore | Google

M.K. Palmore

President of Cyversity & Director, Office of the CISO, Google Cloud Google

At Black Hat in Las Vegas, MK from Cyversity and Google's CISO office discusses the importance of diversity in cybersecurity. Cyversity, in partnership with SANS Institute and CompTIA, offers educational programs to support cybersecurity careers. MK emphasizes problem-solving skills, curiosity, and practical application for success. Generative AI tools allow cybersecurity defenders to be proactive against threats. The partnership between Mandiant and Google Cloud enhances Google's cybersecurity capabilities. Data and security policies are rapidly evolving, fo... Read more

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What are some challenges that the cybersecurity industry has been facing in terms of workforce availability and diversity? add

What are the potential impacts of generative AI on cybersecurity in both commercial enterprise and the public sector? add

What does the recent win allow Google Cloud to do for the first time in its history? add

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MK Palmore | Google

Savannah Peterson

>> Good morning cybersecurity nerds and welcome back to Las Vegas, Nevada. We're here on day two of our coverage at Black Hat. My name is Savannah Peterson. Delighted to be joined with John Furrier, today. John, it's been such a cool show.

>> Day two is going to kick off. We've got a full schedule, a lot of action happening here. It's been amazing.

Savannah Peterson

>> I'm really pleasantly surprised. I feel like I've learned a lot and had some fascinating conversations. Speaking of very excited to have one of those to kick us off today. MK, welcome to the show.

M.K. Palmore

>> Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure.

Savannah Peterson

>> It is such a pleasure. You're a CUBE veteran.

M.K. Palmore

>> We just discovered that, right?

Savannah Peterson

>> Yes, yes. Six years ago. So you've been with us for the long haul. We appreciate that.

M.K. Palmore

>> Absolutely.

Savannah Peterson

>> You've got two really interesting roles. Actually, I suspect you wear many more hats than that, but you're the president of Cyversity and you're also at the office of the CISO at Google.

M.K. Palmore

>> Correct.

Savannah Peterson

>> When do you sleep?

M.K. Palmore

>> I don't, and my family complains about me having probably taken up too much of my bandwidth with work, but these are things that I feel passionate about, things that I feel like I have to be a contributor to in the space, and so we make time for those efforts. My primary job with Google and then the work that I'm doing with Cyversity all both very important to me.

Savannah Peterson

>> I want to talk about that a little bit, because I know you did a panel discussion this morning on diversity, focusing on the power of diversity as a defense against attackers and sitting in the importance of that. I want to give you a moment to have your platform here and talk about that. So tell us about Cyversity and tell us why it's so important in security to have diversity.

M.K. Palmore

>> So we've been grappling with this workforce challenge in cybersecurity now for the better part of a decade plus. We recognize that the people that we bring into the industry have enormous responsibilities, and quite frankly, there's not enough of them in the pipeline to ensure that every organization has a robust cybersecurity apparatus. And so the position of organizations like Cyversity really is that we all need to, as an industry, open up our optic and lens to include people that come from various backgrounds that may not be your typical software developer, software engineer, folks that may not automatically be inclined to the work of cybersecurity, but both have an interest, an inclination to dive into it, an ability to study and learn the material. And so we're just trying to bring more folks to the table, because we recognize that this problem, quite frankly, has to be solved within the cybersecurity community.

Savannah Peterson

>> I think that's so mission-critical and congrats on all the work. I personally appreciate it. As a woman representing some of the diversity in this arena, how do you recruit them? How are you finding your new members?

M.K. Palmore

>> That's not hard. When you put the word out that you are an organization that's interested in bringing folks to the table, we get a lot of people who sign up to become members of our organization.

Savannah Peterson

>> I love that.

M.K. Palmore

>> We have, of course, an existing website at cyversity.org. We put on during the course of any one particular year, a number of educational programs that help people to land and get that initial start into cybersecurity, and we don't do the training directly. We actually partner with the industry's best curriculum providers and we have partnerships with a number of organizations like the SANS Institute, ISC2 CompTIA. We make sure that the partnerships that we have bring educational training and curriculum to the table that's valuable to our members. And so we have kind of a two-part thing. We're trying to bring folks in, get them the training that they need in order to be able to land jobs in cybersecurity, but we also want to place some emphasis around helping people sustain their careers in cybersecurity as well. And so we're now attaching to and developing partners that provide access to mid-level management training, executive training, and so we're trying to touch folks everywhere across the span of their cybersecurity career.

>> MK, last time you were on theCUBE, you were with the FBI and then now you're at Google Cloud. You've seen a lot of the security challenges and one of the things about new talent, and I think we talked about briefly in our last conversation years ago, and it comes up on theCUBE all the time. Cybersecurity is one of those fields where you don't really need a pedigree.

M.K. Palmore

>> Absolutely. It's a skill-based industry.

>> It's also changing so fast. So a lot of people think, oh, I can't have a computer science degree or whatever. No, no, no. Data science and cyber are the two fields where you could come in with a background that's not traditional and rise up. Talk about that impact and what are you seeing from a skill standpoint, because again, sometimes the diversity in thought and also background help solve the problems... It's problem-solving thing. Talk about the skills required for the folks watching that you don't need to go to the special schools or whatever. You can come in if you're smart, you can come and hit the ground running.

M.K. Palmore

>> You have to be inclined and have an interest in the material. I am a perfect example that the skills necessary to thrive in a cybersecurity career can be taught. It was during my career in the government that I turned towards cybersecurity as part of my profession as a special agent in the FBI. And it was during that time that I had to go through all of the initial, sort of start with the foundational pieces, work my way through the certifications, the pieces that will give you sort of that grounding foundation. And then when you take that and couple it with practical application in the job world, it's really a one-two punch. If you can stomach the time that it takes to invest in certs, I'm a big believer in certifications. If you can take the time the stomach and invest the time into that and then apply some practical application to it, it really makes you a formidable candidate in the cybersecurity space.

>> Is there a pattern in terms of skill set like gamers or whatever, people who were natural? What are the natural tendencies....

M.K. Palmore

>> Problem solvers. People that are super inquisitive. People who want to understand how things work, and where problems like the source of problems emanate from tend to be good cybersecurity practitioners. It's this idea...

Savannah Peterson

>> Curious.

M.K. Palmore

>> Curious. It's this idea that you want to dig down until you discover what the problem was and then you want to fix it. You want to institute controls, you want to make changes in the operational, or process of the organization so that the problem doesn't happen again. And those are all skills that you can derive from a number of careers, which is why folks who come from, in my instance, government who have careers as investigators. I just left a conversation we were talking about prior journalists tend to make great cybersecurity practitioners, because they have this idea of getting to the bottom...

Savannah Peterson

>> The investigative side of...

M.K. Palmore

>> The investigative side of the house, getting to the bottom of things.

>> guys.

M.K. Palmore

>> Absolutely.

Savannah Peterson

>> Well, it actually comes down to passion though. We had a conversation with Jackie from Cribble yesterday and the theme that I hear in this community is you have to be passionate about it.

M.K. Palmore

>> Absolutely.

Savannah Peterson

>> Because the folks on the other side...

M.K. Palmore

>> It's a grind....

Savannah Peterson

>> are passionate about it.

M.K. Palmore

>> Well, they're passionate about achieving their objective, which is .

>> Objective.

Savannah Peterson

>> Exactly.

M.K. Palmore

>> It's very objective, which is oftentimes to simply make money off of these transactional exploits that they engage in.

Savannah Peterson

>> You've had some cool jobs. I can imagine that the audience listening right now is like special agent at the FBI, he's in this very cool office at Google. He is also got this nonprofit going on. It's very, very awesome. Was it challenging to go from working for the government to working for a publicly traded Fortune 100 company?

M.K. Palmore

>> So I worked 32 years in the US government. I feel like I did my piece...

Savannah Peterson

>> Bless you....

M.K. Palmore

>> for a country and all. I had always planned to spend a career in government, and so it had a shelf life to it. I did it. I retired from service. It wasn't difficult, because I feel like a lot of the skills that I developed over that 32 year span, especially in the area of leadership, are all applicable to the experiences that I'm having in the private sector.

>> Talk about the public-private partnerships. One of the things that's been in the hallway conversation here at Black Hat is a lot of the talent in the government and a lot of talent in the private sector are coming together.

M.K. Palmore

>> Absolutely.

>> Can you share your view on that? Because more than ever, sharing information obviously against threats and issues and vulnerabilities is huge from zero days to threat actors. What's the public-private partnership landscape look like? What's the playbook? What's successful look like?

M.K. Palmore

>> I think it's as good as it's ever been, because we recognize this is an all-hands-on-deck issue, and that no one singular entity is going to be capable of solving sort of the cybersecurity landscape challenge. Government plays a role, they have a big piece to play in it. They have observations and visibility into the landscape that are unique and unlike most other organizations on the planet. And certainly the private sector plays an immense role in this as well. I represent one of the biggest technology firms on the planet. Our visibility into the cyber threat landscape is unique as well. And so when you think about combining forces between the big tech companies, private and public partnerships with government and otherwise and non-profit organizations, you begin to get this flywheel effect where you're actually able to impact and make a difference in the industry, so it's immensely important. I think we don't solve the challenge without public-private partnerships, just because I don't think anyone singular entity is capable of solving this.

>> How's Google Cloud doing right now with the government enterprise sector? Obviously our data shows obviously the compute sides growing, all aspects of infrastructure and platforms and services growing significantly. Obviously they've got the G Suite and all of the applications, but the infrastructure side is growing significantly. What's Google Cloud up to?

M.K. Palmore

>> So this is an area where we've made significant investments. As we were talking before we came on camera here, in the past 12 months or so, we've made not only significant investments, but have come to market with very specific products that are geared towards that highly sensitive data workload classification, this ability of government entities quite frankly around the world to be able to avail themselves of the kinds of technology that Google Cloud brings to the table, but at the same time be able to adhere to their significant classification requirements. And so we've got a couple of products in the market space right now that are getting quite a bit of traction in the way of our, something we're calling Google Distributed Cloud and also our Assured Workloads product. We're seeing a lot of uptake across the global public sector with products like that, that seem to be working for their needs.

Savannah Peterson

>> It makes sense that everyone has to work together. These problems are too big and it's usually actually geopolitical as much as it is versus companies or bad actors. I'm curious, so with the explosion of GenAI over the last two years, how has that impacted your role? You started at Google three years ago just before this hype curve acceleration. So I'm curious, how has that made your job different? What are you seeing?

M.K. Palmore

>> We're super bullish on obviously generative AI and what impact we think it can have on not only commercial enterprise, but also in the public sector. And there's lots of reasons for that. I think that we're seeing for the first time from a defender standpoint, an ability of cybersecurity defenders to be much more proactive through the use of AI tools than they have been historically, which means that now they may very well either be able to match the adversarial activity, and/or extend their capabilities in a way that puts them on a proactive edge, which makes them better defenders. And so AI has this possibility of turning the landscape into one where defenders for the very first time have an ability to lean into cybersecurity in a way that makes it substantive and responsive to the needs of the organization. From an operational standpoint, business operations, I can tell you that nearly every conversation that we have on the commercial side with customers has a component of AI discussions. Companies want to know, how do we leverage this technology? How does it make us more efficient? What can we do? And those are things that they're learning either through use cases that we are sharing with them or just in creative sessions, trying to come up with problems that we can help them solve through this new technology that we really are seeing organizations become more efficient, deliver constituent services, certainly in the public sector space and just become more agile as organizations.

>> Google Cloud can't be ignored. You guys are massive in size, growing significantly on the cloud front, performance is there. We had Kevin Mandia on theCUBE last year, and obviously Mandiant was acquired by Google. You can't ignore the fact that they're one of the best threat intelligence players out there.

M.K. Palmore

>> Globally known.

>> Amazing company, great group. We'll be covering their coming up shortly.

Savannah Peterson

>> I was going to say...

>> Savannah will be there. How has that impacted? Because Google security and what you guys do with customers, now you've got Mandiant into the fold, must be a huge win in terms of what they bring to the table. How does that impact in the Google security posture and how does that help you with customers?

M.K. Palmore

>> It's a massive win for us. It allows Google Cloud for the first time in its history to be able to essentially be of use to our customers across the entire cybersecurity life cycle. Every use case that you can think of from planning strategically to how to build out cybersecurity programs and apparatus through the advisory work that Mandiant does, all the way through what we call the five now six pillars of the NIST Cybersecurity Framework. We're there on the front end, we're there in the middle with detection and response, and we're there at the end in terms of being able to now send teams that can help organizations right size themselves after major security incidents. So it really is a bit of a game changer for Google Cloud, and it now means that we get to compete in space that historically we haven't been able to compete in.

>> Mk, one of the things that came up yesterday, and it's been in conversation we've seen all the time in the industry, more acute than ever before here is the role of policy around data and around security. Obviously we talked about yesterday, Savannah, around policy versus . I think things are good versus this is the policy, one gets fired if it doesn't work if you're on the wrong side of that. What policies are emerging that you see that are important for customers to kind think besides the basic security posture? Because the role of data is now more important than ever. You talk about distributed computing, you got sovereign cloud, you got proprietary data that's an asset where generative AI is going to be part of, so you got data now management changing significantly and you got geographical issues. So how is policy being shaped? When I say policy, I don't mean like government policy, I mean like company policy around how to handle things from a CISO perspective.

M.K. Palmore

>> I think you've probably touched on an area that's of great sensitivity for most commercial enterprise. This is the area where I think they're spending the most time trying to get their hands wrapped around because of issues like data sovereignty, the need to contextually regionally ensure that data resides in any one particular place, that the access to the data is limited to a particular profile or persona within the companies for which they represent. And these are all challenges that we have engineered towards in order to be able to meet our customers where they are. But I do see the policy piece as being the area where there's a lot of emphasis being placed on, and this is one of those areas where when you start thinking about AI and its impact to enterprise, this is where companies are spending a tremendous amount of time trying to make sure they understand potential impact to enterprise, the change management necessary to incorporate this new technology into the enterprise and effectively use it while adhering to their own internal policies. And so it's a representative challenge, but it's one certainly from the Google Cloud perspective.

>> You mentioned NIST earlier. Is there any groups that you think or any new things coming out from an industry standpoint that are relevant, people should pay attention to?

M.K. Palmore

>> Yeah, I mean from the Google cloud standpoint, we recently launched a coalition that we're calling the Secure AI Framework Coalition, which is essentially... We did a lot of the pioneering work on LLMs, and we were the first to come to market with a framework that we thought might be helpful for organizations to adopt artificial intelligence principles. And so this coalition brings together other enterprises with an idea to create an industry voice and narrative around how organizations can develop policies, develop the frameworks internally necessary to adopt this and emerging technology. And so I think that announcement certainly rings the bell on initiatives around new technology, its potential impact on how organizations need to get their heads wrapped around it.

Savannah Peterson

>> Wow. Sounds like a lot of things are moving really fast and you're thinking about all of them with the right players...

M.K. Palmore

>> You bet. You bet....

Savannah Peterson

>> which is very exciting. All right, last question for you because it's been fantastic, and obviously we're going to have you on again. What do you hope to be able to say a year from now when we're back at Black Hat that you can't say today?

M.K. Palmore

>> If I can't say it today, how can I say it now?

Savannah Peterson

>> Well see, I can tell that you used to work for the FBI, because most people just walk into this question without even realizing it. You're welcome to give me a secret, but it could be a progress in the market.

>> question.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah, yeah, exactly.

M.K. Palmore

>> I have an answer for that. One, and I'll take the two domains for what you guys invited me to have this conversation. One, from the cybersecurity workforce standpoint, I hope to be able to say that organizations and our industry are making unique and demonstrative strides towards increasing our ability to bring different folks into the cybersecurity space.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yes.

M.K. Palmore

>> That is again, a passion topic for me, and it's where I spend a significant amount of time. On the just pure cybersecurity side, I would love to see more public sector organizations adopt new and emerging technologies in a much more rapid fashion to get ahead of what has historically been a legacy of technology debt and inability to be agile across the technology spectrum. And we're seeing it piecemeal, but I would love to see more wide-scale adoption of new and emerging technology by public sector entities.

Savannah Peterson

>> Oh, I love that. I like both of those things. So I agree with those. I would love for us to be able to say that. Thank you so much for joining us this morning.

M.K. Palmore

>> You bet. Thanks for having me.

Savannah Peterson

>> Absolutely. Great. And John, always a pleasure as always, and thank all of you for tuning into our two days of wonderful coverage here in fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada at Black Hat. My name's Savannah Peterson. You're watching theCUBE, the leading source for cybersecurity news.