Show Notes
How can sysadmins help software developers work securely and make more secure applications? While at NDC in Toronto, Richard sat down with Tanya Janca of SheCodesPurple to discuss what admins can do to help address the security challenges software developers face. Tanya talks about securing development environment and pipelines - developers routinely work from high privilege accounts because their tools require it, and as a result, have become the targets of black hats to get access to accounts, keys, and other exploitable resources. There are plenty of tools available to help work through the issues, including the latest AI-powered tools. LLMs can also help generate more secure code in the first place, and Tanya has created a set of prompts you can use to create more secure software. The threat landscape is shifting with these tools, and we need to act quickly to resist the new attacks!
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What are the risks of using agents in your organization? While at NDC in Oslo, Richard sat down with Will Velida to talk about the OWASP Top 10 for Agentic Applications. AI agents promise productivity gains, but they also introduce entirely new attack surfaces. Richard and Will explore threats such as prompt injection, agent goal hijacking, memory poisoning, privilege abuse, and cascading failures across multi-agent workflows. They also discuss the tooling, governance frameworks, and security practices organizations need to adopt to move agentic applications from proof-of-concept to production safely.
Turning on every tool in M365 is rarely a successful strategy - so how do you choose? Richard chats with Joy Apple about her work as a consultant helping organizations use the huge array of products in the M365 universe. Joy talks about meeting people where they are - understanding how they currently work, and then finding tools that can best amplify their productivity. Collaboration tools are a huge part of that story - finding ways to work together is always a challenge. And that's one of the many reasons there are so many tools in M365... It's all about addressing what people want to do!
What can Cloudflare do for you? While at KCDC in Kansas City, Richard chatted with Bob Fornal about how his organization uses Cloudflare - not just for content delivery or DDoS protection, but also edge compute - and more! Bob talks about moving workloads between the client and server, where Cloudflare Workers can run some code and save time while staying secure. This leads to a broader conversation about introducing these tools to your organization - it's not likely something web developers will ask for. Still, it can help them, and collaboration between development and operations is always a positive in an organization!
How is artificial intelligence changing cybersecurity and penetration testing? Richard talks to Paula Januszkiewicz about how her team now uses large language models throughout the security workflow, from vulnerability research and data analysis to penetration testing and incident response. Paula explains that AI hasn't replaced security professionals, but it has dramatically accelerated the work, making it possible to analyze more data, build better tools, and identify attack paths faster than ever before. The conversation also explores the defender's perspective, including monitoring, logging, incident response, and why organizations still need to eliminate insecure technologies like NTLM. AI is changing cybersecurity rapidly, but the fundamentals of security remain the same.
Microsoft offers a surprising number of ways to build agents in Microsoft 365. Which one should you choose? Richard talks to Andrew Connell about the evolving Microsoft 365 Copilot landscape and the four major approaches to building agents. Starting with SharePoint Agents for document-focused scenarios, Andrew walks through Agent Builder inside Microsoft 365 Copilot, the increasingly popular Copilot Studio in the Power Platform ecosystem, and the often-overlooked Agents Toolkit for VS Code. Along the way, he discusses governance, licensing, publishing models, security concerns, and when Azure Foundry makes sense. The result is a practical guide to understanding Microsoft's growing agent platform and choosing the right tool for your organization.