Penelope Iroko Table of Contents
Cybersecurity leadership strategies took center stage as Red Canary cofounder Keith McCammon outlined pragmatic guidance for CISOs in a recent interview. He emphasized outcome-driven security programs that tie detection and response to measurable business risk.
The conversation addressed how security teams can improve signal fidelity, reduce dwell time, and scale defenses without adding tool sprawl.
McCammon highlighted detection engineering, threat hunting, and incident response maturation as critical levers. He urged leaders to align SOC priorities with risk registers and board level outcomes, not feature checklists. He also outlined how AI, automation, and playbooks can improve speed and consistency while maintaining analyst oversight.
Key topics included identity-centric attacks, cloud and SaaS exposure, ransomware readiness, and zero trust controls. He advised using frameworks like MITRE ATT&CK to baseline coverage and drive continuous improvement across SIEM, EDR, MDR, and SOAR investments.
Cybersecurity Leadership Strategies: What You Need to Know
- Focus on outcomes, not tools. Mature detection and response, align to risk, and use automation and AI to scale the SOC responsibly.
Strategic Priorities for CISOs
McCammon’s guidance centers on building defensible security programs that withstand scrutiny from boards, auditors, and regulators.
CISOs should translate threat exposure into business terms and invest where risk concentrates, especially identity, cloud workloads, and third party access.
He advocates consolidating telemetry, improving detection coverage mapped to MITRE ATT&CK, and validating controls with adversary emulation and purple teaming.
Build Outcome Driven Detection and Response
Rather than chasing the next tool, McCammon advises standardizing on a core stack that pairs EDR and SIEM with MDR or SOAR to close the gap between detection and containment.
Detection engineering should curate high fidelity analytics, suppress noisy signatures, and enrich alerts with identity and asset context.
Incident response must be rehearsed with tabletop exercises and codified playbooks to reduce handoffs and accelerate containment.
Metrics That Matter to Security Leaders
Leaders need metrics that reflect risk reduction, not volume. McCammon recommends concentrating on:
- Mean time to detect and mean time to respond across incident severities
- Dwell time and percent of detections sourced from proactive hunting
- Detection coverage mapped to ATT&CK techniques relevant to the threat model
- Alert fidelity, analyst throughput, and automation assisted resolution rates
- Ransomware readiness indicators including backup immutability and recovery time
Talent, Automation, and AI in the SOC
Automation should absorb repetitive tasks such as enrichment, correlation, and containment where playbooks are well-defined. McCammon sees AI assisting triage and knowledge retrieval, but cautions against delegating final decisions without human checks.
Upskilling analysts on detection engineering and cloud identity is a force multiplier, while tier consolidation and clear escalation paths reduce burnout and error rates.
Governance and Board Alignment
Effective governance connects technical work to enterprise risk. McCammon urges CISOs to align initiatives with business objectives, compliance mandates, and threat intelligence.
Reports to the board should communicate exposure trends, resilience posture, and tested recovery capabilities. Budget requests should tie to risk-reduction outcomes rather than to tool acquisitions.
Practical Modernization Steps
McCammon’s framework encourages pragmatic modernization. Prioritize high-impact controls such as phishing-resistant MFA, identity threat detection, and least privilege.
Normalize telemetry across endpoints, cloud, and SaaS to improve visibility. Use continuous validation to confirm that EDR policies, conditional access, and data protections work under realistic attack paths.
Addressing Cloud and Identity Attack Surfaces
Identity remains the primary intrusion vector. McCammon stresses continuous monitoring of authentication patterns, privileged access, and service account misuse.
For cloud and SaaS, he points to posture management, configuration baselines, workload isolation, and detection for control plane abuse. Integrating IAM, EDR, and cloud logs enables faster lateral movement detection and containment.
Implications for Security Leaders
McCammon’s approach helps CISOs cut through tooling noise and demonstrate clear risk reduction. Teams benefit from higher alert fidelity, faster response, and a measurable improvement in resilience.
Mature detection engineering and automation can reduce burnout, increase consistency, and free analysts for higher value work such as threat hunting.
However, shifting to outcome-driven operations requires disciplined prioritization, data engineering, and cross-team collaboration. Automation and AI can introduce new failure modes without guardrails or quality data.
Consolidating tools and normalizing telemetry demand sustained investment and may surface gaps in process and skills that leaders must address.
Conclusion
McCammon’s playbook frames a clear path for CISOs. Align to business risk, prioritize identity and cloud, and prove progress with rigorous metrics. Build a SOC that favors signal over noise and speed over complexity.
Detection engineering, automation, and careful AI adoption can raise the floor of security operations. Validation through ATT&CK mapping, purple teaming, and tabletops ensures controls work when it matters.
For security leaders navigating budget pressure and escalating threats, the mandate is direct. Reduce dwell time, contain faster, and communicate outcomes the business understands.
Questions Worth Answering
What are the top priorities for modern CISOs?
Align security to business risk, mature detection and response, and focus on identity and cloud exposures.
Which metrics best demonstrate security outcomes?
Track MTTD, MTTR, dwell time, ATT&CK coverage, alert fidelity, and recovery readiness.
How should AI be used in the SOC?
Use AI to augment triage, enrichment, and knowledge access with human oversight on final actions.
What is detection engineering and why does it matter?
It curates high fidelity analytics that reduce noise and increase true positive detection across key attack techniques.
How can teams validate that controls work?
Map detections to ATT&CK, conduct adversary emulation, run purple team exercises, and test incident playbooks.
Where should automation be applied first?
Automate enrichment, correlation, and containment steps with clear guardrails and measurable outcomes.
How can CISOs communicate effectively with the board?
Report exposure trends, demonstrated resilience, and risk reduction tied to prioritized business objectives.
About Red Canary
Red Canary is a security company focused on managed detection and response for enterprise environments. The firm integrates endpoint, cloud, and identity telemetry to surface high fidelity threats.
Its services combine detection engineering, threat hunting, and incident response to reduce dwell time and improve containment. Customers span regulated and high growth industries.
Red Canary aligns detections to MITRE ATT&CK and emphasizes measurable outcomes that map to business risk and resilience goals.
About Keith McCammon
Keith McCammon is the Chief Security Officer and cofounder of Red Canary. He leads research, detection engineering, and incident response strategy.
McCammon is known for advancing practical detection and response practices that scale in enterprise environments. His work emphasizes measurable outcomes.
He frequently speaks on SOC modernization, ATT&CK based coverage, and aligning cybersecurity programs with business risk and resilience.
