I got someone special here,
a sponsor I'd really like to talk to.
I know everyone's going to be interested.
Really big part of the community infrastructure services in general.
Talking more about it, I have Keith.
Hey, Keith, how are you doing?
Good, John. Thanks for having me on today.
No, thank you for your support.
Really excited to have you guys.
Quick intro, can you introduce yourself and talk about what you do at ngrok?
Yeah, absolutely. My nickname is Danger,
but my actual name is Keith Casey.
I tell people my first name is Danger.
Conveniently enough, my email is danger at ngrok.com.
But what I do at ngrok is I make sure that we're telling stories that are useful,
that we're sharing documentation that's useful,
that we're sharing use cases that are useful,
making sure we're solving
real problems for people as opposed to convincing them they have problems they don't actually have.
Very cool. Awesome.
So, yeah, again, thank you for supporting Red Team Village.
Just wanted to know why you wanted to be involved and like,
what are your ties to like cybersecurity?
Yeah, absolutely.
So myself personally, a good number of people on the ngrok team spent years at Okta doing single sign on identity management.
So there's a lot of deep identity and security roots there.
InGrok itself, we're an active participant in the ecosystem.
We've got millions of users.
And unfortunately, some portion of them are bad actors.
If you caught the Trend Micro report a few months ago, we are often using phishing tools, which is unfortunate.
And we're trying to stop that.
We're trying to work together with different teams to prevent that from happening.
So, we looked out for guys like yourself or teams like Red Team Village and everything to be able to say, what are people doing?
Like, what's the bleeding edge of stuff?
How can we learn what's going on?
And we wanted to meet the responsible researchers out there, work with you guys more regularly, more quickly, so that when patterns happen, we can go ahead, we can step in, we can interrupt them.
We want to, you know, work with some of the best and brightest, see what they're doing, see what we can learn, see how we can mitigate things.
And more than anything, like, learn about what's going on.
What you're doing in your day job, even outside of ngrok, totally unrelated to that sort of thing, because, you know, we are a major player in the ecosystem and we want to be a good citizen about that.
Definitely, yeah, no, it's a great product, really nice to use for good security practices.
It's just unfortunate it's been abused, but it really goes towards the accessibility and availability and how awesome the product is, the tunneling, the edge service.
So.
Yeah, I guess if you could talk about, you know, it's going to be interesting discussions with your team and some of the participants, but for someone that isn't really entrenched into cybersecurity, what would you say your top three recommendations are for, like, starting in there?
Ooh, getting started.
Getting started is always one of the hardest things to think of, because I try to rewind back to when I was doing it.
I'd say right now.
A good principle, career principle in general, not just cybersecurity related, is always be learning, pick up, see what people are doing, see what the latest news reports are.
When you when there's a breach that happens, there's one going around right now related to SMS and second factor, read about it, learn, dig into the postmortem, see what's going on, see how see how it was perpetrated on the flip side, see how it could have been mitigated.
So with the like the SMS attack going on right now, you figure out pretty quickly that OTP.
Codes are not always the best option and in fact, are often not a good option at all in different circumstances.
Right.
So so it's it's learning and then understanding what works and what doesn't work.
And then me personally, one of the things that's always served me well is whenever I'm trying to analyze a system, whether that system is an organization or whether that is an application or whatever, I try to dig up the assumptions.
What assumptions did somebody have when they're building this, when they're designing this this operation?
And what happens if all those assumptions are wrong?
So how can we test each of them?
How can we figure out if this assumption is wrong?
What happens then?
And frankly, it's so much fun because people think, oh, yeah, this is always going to be the case or this will never be the case.
And then you just tweak it.
You figure out, well, what happens now?
Awesome.
Yeah, no, it is fun stuff.
And I'm happy that that's kind of like the the motto you guys go by.
And I'm sure.
It's like it's a similar mentality.
Is NGROC hiring?
If so, how can people find out more information?
Yeah.
So we're hiring just across just about every team.
We're about forty five people right now.
We're looking at twenty to thirty people by the end of the year.
That's in marketing and sales in engineering.
And we're looking actually for a couple of application security people.
So those are obviously top of mind for this group.
But just go to NGROC dot com slash careers.
And you can find everything there.
In addition, we're on Twitter in NGROC HQ.
Find us on LinkedIn.
We've got a great team and we're hiring across just about every team and happy to talk to everybody.
Yeah.
Awesome.
No.
After talking with you and your teammates, really great people to work with and excited to work with them during the the con.
And yeah, thank you so much for your time.
Yeah.
You know, I'll make sure if people go to the careers.
They say danger sent me.
Right.
Yeah.
Well, I always tell people when you need to find me, look for danger and I'll be there.
So you have questions about NGROC specifically.
Feel free to draw me an email.
It's danger at NGROC dot com.
All right.
Well, thank you again.