KBKAST

Dr. Ahana Datta Fasel has spent years mapping 30 years of China’s cyber operations, and she opens by dismantling the story most of us have absorbed. China isn’t only hunting our secrets. Sometimes it wants to know what we know about them, sometimes it’s watching its own diaspora, and often the intent behind an operation is genuinely hard to read. She walks KB through why cyber has become inseparable from live conflict, from Ukraine’s power grids to the CCTVs of Tehran, and why the line between spying and preparing for war keeps moving. She explains the operation sitting inside America’s major telecom networks, where hackers have held access for three years and done nothing with it, and what that patience might mean. We also get into Five Eyes politics, the Huawei decisions, and why the West still doesn’t have a coherent China strategy. Ahana’s book, Full Stack Spies: Cyber Espionage in the Age of US-China Competition, is out in North America on 1 October. Grab it on Amazon (https://a.co/d/01aovOFW) or from Oxford University Press (https://global.oup.com/academic/product/full-stack-spies-9780197871386), where the code ADISTA5 takes 30 percent off. About Ahana: A former UK Government cyber leader and Financial Times cyber chief, Dr. Ahana Datta Fasel advises global governments and industry on geopolitical, AI and systemic risk strategies. She serves as non-executive director at a leading global digital rights charity, adviser to deep tech start-ups, and a strategic adviser on national security and resilience to the UK body for research, innovation and international partnerships. She has held fellowships at Cornell, Cambridge, Imperial and Durham, and her op-eds have appeared in the FT, Foreign Policy, Euractiv and the Columbia Journalism Review. Keywords: China cyber operations, cyber espionage, US-China competition, Full Stack Spies, geopolitics, Five Eyes, telecom breach, act of war, Taiwan, national security, hybrid warfare, Huawei

Shane Buckley, CEO of Gigamon, has watched the AI spending story turn in months. Companies that treated token consumption as a badge of honour are now blowing through their AI budget by day three of the month, with the bill hitting earnings reports and boardrooms. He explains why more tools never meant more security, why he expects rising data centre costs to push token prices up, and why augmentation beats replacement. Then comes the security squeeze. Using his pizza analogy, AI eats the budget just as attackers get their own AI. About Shane: Shane Buckley is President and Chief Executive Officer of Gigamon, having previously held the title of President and Chief Operating Officer before his appointment as CEO in 2022. He brings more than 25 years of executive management experience to the team with prior roles including CEO at Xirrus, General Manager and Senior Vice President at NETGEAR, President and CEO of Rohati Systems, and COO at Nevis Networks. Shane is a graduate of engineering from the Munster Technological University in Ireland. Keywords: tokenomics, AI budget, tool bloat, next-generation SIEM, data lake, AI security, augmentation, hybrid AI, on-premise LLMs, cloud adoption, network visibility, vibe coding

Reece takes us behind the scenes of the Instructure incident, where his team fielded 65 instructions in 48 hours, and explains how a catastrophic cyber event actually gets run across insurers, government and thousands of schools at once. KB & Reece get into the hidden cost almost no one budgets for, business interruption, and what the JLR and Change Healthcare cases reveal about how dependent our economy has become on a handful of suppliers. He also makes the case that AI is quietly splitting security budgets in two, and why that worries him. For any leader thinking seriously about resilience, this one is worth your time. About Reece: Reece Corbett-Wilkins is the Head of First Response Australia, and is the Chief Strategy Officer at Atmos. For over 10 years, Reece has focused exclusively on cyber and privacy risk, having helped 1,000+ organisations through some of their most challenging times. Reece is particularly experienced in managing large scale multi-party data breaches, both locally and globally, and ransomware response. Reece works closely with the incident response industry, government, and law enforcement to achieve optimal outcomes for clients. Keywords: cyber resilience, incident response, business interruption, cyber insurance, critical infrastructure, SPHERE, ransomware, supply chain risk, SOCI reform, AI security budget, CAT event, small business cyber

When Mythos hit in April, the security world split between panic and hype. Sumedh Thakar, President and CEO of Qualys, joins KB to make the calmer case that Mythos accelerated an old threat rather than inventing one. They get into why zero-day vulnerabilities now need zero-day remediation, the misread that Mythos runs on your own code while your vendors use it too, the board conversation it reopened, tokenomics and budget pressure, and how much a CISO should really hand to the machines. About Sumedh: As a cybersecurity visionary, Sumedh is passionate about making the world’s digital journey safer. His education and early experiences as a coder led him to Qualys, where he rose from engineer to president and CEO. He joined Qualys in 2003, shortly after the company’s founding and in an era when organizations started using the cloud but didn’t know what to call it. His contributions and leadership helped propel Qualys to its current success in cybersecurity. Sumedh became president and CEO in 2021. In 2019, he was named president, and prior to that, he was chief product officer, driving the company’s vision of making enterprise security more efficient and disrupting the VM space with integrated capabilities like patch management and cybersecurity asset management. A “product fanatic and engineer at heart,” Sumedh was instrumental in dramatically expanding the original Qualys platform’s scope, integrations, and automations. He also scaled the company’s engineering talent internationally with a global 24×7 follow-the-sun product team. He is a co-inventor of five U.S. patents for cybersecurity technology in Qualys offerings. Previously, Sumedh was an engineer at Intacct, an early cloud-based financial and accounting software provider. He also worked at Northwest Airlines developing complex algorithms for its yield and revenue management reservation system. He has a bachelor’s degree in computer engineering with distinction from Savitribai Phule Pune University. Keywords: Mythos, AI security, cybersecurity, zero-day, autonomous remediation, vulnerability management, CISO strategy, board reporting, Qualys, Sumedh Thakar, patch management, true risk, exposure management, AI attacks, first-party code

The tech running hospitals, power grids and government services often still works. Sarah Sloan, Cisco’s Head of Cybersecurity Policy for APAC, joins KB to explain why that’s the problem, not the reassurance it sounds like. Drawing on a new ASPI report Cisco funded, “Past its use-by-date,” they get into why so much end-of-life tech is still in place (usually budgets and skills, not negligence), how AI and quantum turned a slow-burn risk into an urgent one, and why most organisations still can’t see the ageing gear in their own environment. Plus the upside: why moving early beats being forced by an incident. About Sarah: Sarah Sloan is Head of Cybersecurity Policy APAC, Cisco where she leads public sector engagement on cybersecurity policy matters across the region. With over 15 years’ experience across government, industry, and consulting — including more than a decade focused on cyber and technology — Sarah has held senior roles in the Australian Government and leading global technology firms, driving policy development, public-private sector partnerships, and national cybersecurity priorities. She holds a Bachelor of Laws (Hons) and Bachelor of Asia-Pacific Studies from the Australian National University (ANU), and postgraduate qualifications in legal practice, international law, and Japanese studies. Sarah is also Chair of the Australian Industry Information Association’s (AIIA) National Security and Cyber Resilience Policy Advisory Network. Keywords: end-of-life technology, legacy systems, critical infrastructure, cybersecurity governance, ASPI, Cisco, Legacy Five, board risk, post-quantum cryptography, AI cyber threats, SOCI Act, technology lifecycle, cost of downtime, CISO, digital resilience