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CISO Thoughts with
David Lindner

Contrast Security CISO David Lindner provides his top three weekly insights for CISOs, developers and the security community here. These are updated every Friday, so be sure to check back for the latest news on what's top of mind in AppSec and DevSecOps.

The latest insights as of June 6, 2025:

 

threat actor names

 

 

Insight No. 1 — Fixing threat actor names

Microsoft and CrowdStrike announced that they’ll work together on the headache of multiple  names for the same threat actors. But what matters most is who did it (if we know), what they accessed and what’s being done about it. That’s what customers, media and leadership want to hear. What if, in the heat of a live incident response, the only thing slowing you down was trying to decipher whether "Storm-0530" was a new group or just another name for something you already knew? We spend valuable cycles on threat actor branding, an exercise largely irrelevant to immediate crisis management. The focus should always be on actionable intelligence: understanding the breach, assessing the damage and rapidly restoring operations.

 

Insight No. 2 — AI legal ownership problem

We're barreling into an AI future, but many CISOs are overlooking the elephant in the room: legal ownership of AI-generated content. Data provenance was already a nightmare. With AI, it's a fantasy. While some Large Language Models (LLMs) attempt attribution, it's often incomplete or impractical. The real long-term threat isn't just where the data came from, but who legally owns it and its derivatives. Businesses are moving forward, blindly accepting these profound, unresolved liabilities.

ownership of AI content

 

 

 

 

pile of criticals

 

 

Insight No. 3 — CVSS scores are lying

It’s time to call out the dirty little secret of vulnerability management: Your default Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) scores are lying to you. We’re drowning engineers in a deluge of "critical" Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs) from direct, transitive and environmental dependencies that rarely pose a true threat. This isn't just inefficient; it's actively harming our security posture by obscuring what genuinely matters. Risk prioritization isn't a suggestion; it's the only path out of this mess. CVSS is merely a starting point, not the definitive answer.

 

fingerpointing

 

Don’t let your work culture hurt your cybersecurity

Foster a healthy cybersecurity culture by rewarding proactive reporting as opposed to  punishing mistakes. Shift from a blame-heavy mindset to one that values resilience and collaboration, reducing errors, and strengthening defenses.

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Cybersecurity Insights with Contrast CISO David Lindner 05/30/25

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Cybersecurity Insights with Contrast CISO David Lindner | 05/23/25

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Cybersecurity Insights with Contrast CISO David Lindner | 05/16/25

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David Lindner

Chief Information Security Officer, Contrast Security

David is an experienced application security professional with over 20 years in cybersecurity. In addition to serving as the chief information security officer, David leads the Contrast Labs team that is focused on analyzing threat intelligence to help enterprise clients develop more proactive approaches to their application security programs. Throughout his career, David has worked within multiple disciplines in the security field—from application development to network architecture design and support, to IT security and consulting, to security training, to application security. Over the past decade, David has specialized in all things related to mobile applications and securing them. He has worked with many clients across industry sectors, including financial, government, automobile, healthcare, and retail. David is an active participant in numerous bug bounty programs.

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