7MS #518: Interview with Amanda Berlin of Blumira

Brian Johnson -

Today we're pumped to share a featured interview with Amanda Berlin, Lead Incident Detection Engineer at Blumira. You might already be familiar with Amanda's awesome Defensive Security Handbook or fine work with Mental Health Hackers. We polled our Slack friends and structured this interview as an AAA (Ask Amanda Anything). That resulted in a really fun chat that covered many things technical and not technical! Questions we posed to Amanda include:

  • Can you tell us more about your infosec superhero origin story and creation of your book?

  • Will there ever be a new version of the Defensive Security Handbook?

  • What blue team certs/YouTube vids/classes/conferences give the best bang for your buck?

  • Was it a mistake to invent computers?

  • From a logging standpoint, what devices provide blind spots (Linux systems, ioT devices, etc.)?

  • You can wave a magic wand and solve any three security challenges instantly - what do you choose?

  • Infosec Twitter drama. Love it? Leave it? Something inbetween?

  • Tips to prevent business email compromise?

  • How do we keep beloved family/friends (who keep falling prey to social engineering campaigns) safer on their computers and on the Web?

  • Our company had a partial ransomware deployment a few years ago. Is changing Active Directory passwords changed and formatting affected systems enough? (Spoiler alert: no. See Microsoft's advice on the topic)