A Farewell from Sherrod: New Season Coming Soon

Sherrod DeGrippo: Hi, everyone. Welcome to the Microsoft Threat Intelligence Podcast. I'm Sherrod DeGrippo with Microsoft, and this is my sign-off. It has been an amazing three and a half years doing this podcast and getting to meet all of you, learning about threat actors with you, getting questions from you, having people randomly come up to me and say, "Hey, are you from that podcast?" And yes, I am from that podcast. When I started at Microsoft, my boss was John Lambert, who is kind of a legend. If you're not aware of him, go search him. He has a lot of really great writing on security and software and development. And when I first started, he said, "Hey, I want you to do a podcast." And I said, "Great. Whose podcast is it?" And he said, "No, I want you to do a podcast." I'd been a podcast guest many times, was fine with being a guest. I said, "Oh, you want me to, like, run it, host it, figure it all out?" And he said, "Yeah, get a podcast going." So there were some fantastic people early on who helped me get that together. You know who you are. And we put a podcast together. I'd never done that before, and I found it really fun. I really enjoyed hearing from experts, asking them crazy questions, learning about what people were working on. And I think, ultimately, we made a dent in the threat landscape. One of the things I remember is some time ago, one of the MSTIC analysts came to me and said, "Hey, you won't believe this. I just got a note from a customer. They are experiencing an incident." And I said, "Oh, that's terrible." And he said, "Yeah, but we got on site to look at the incident, and they said, 'Don't worry. We know who this threat actor is, and we know their TTPs because we listened to Sherrod's podcast episode about this threat actor.'" Which I just thought was so fantastic that we have customers and practitioners and intel analysts and just general people who are interested, listening to the show, understanding the work, thinking about the threat landscape, and in some cases, leveraging the information that we talk about to get a better handle on an incident that they're actively going through. So I deeply appreciate all of you listening, and hope that I will see you elsewhere. Please don't forget to come say hi to me if you see me at conferences. I will certainly be at all the big ones going forward still. And if you run into me, please do ask me for some kind of sticker because I'll have something on hand. And follow me on LinkedIn. I deeply appreciate all of you listening, and I want to say thank you so much to every guest that I have had. That's where the content comes from. That's what makes the show great. Every guest has been an amazing one, and I deeply appreciate all the time and prep that you put into being on the show. So thank you to my listeners. Thank you to all of my guests. Thank you to the production team. And, of course, thank you to all of those at Microsoft that have been supportive.

Elliot Volkman: Hey, there. Elliot, the executive producer for the Microsoft Threat Intelligence Podcast here. And unfortunately, as you had heard, Sherrod is leaving the world of Microsoft, but she is taking on a vice president of threat intelligence role at one of our peer organizations. So I personally could not be more excited and proud for the work that she has done here. Over the past three years, building this community with you all and being the voice of the Microsoft Threat Intelligence brand has been such a privilege for a lot of us to see the impact and disruption and ability to, honestly, just empower researchers and other analysts with the information that we put out there. But why you are seeing my face is twofold. First, we absolutely love Sherrod and could not highlight the importance and impact that she has had on our community, and if I had a sneaking suspicion, she'll probably pick up the podcast mic under another brand in the coming weeks or months, if we're lucky. But that being said, we did want to make sure that you, as a community, had a proper farewell so that she didn't just disappear and you didn't just randomly see new faces or new voices like mine, which, candidly, I was trying to keep behind the scenes for the foreseeable ever. That being said, the brand Microsoft Threat Intelligence has expanded significantly over the years, so this was always sort of part of the plan to have new faces and voices, to expand the abilities and capabilities and our worldview of intelligence at Microsoft. So, fortunately or unfortunately, that means, while we won't have a Sherrod every single time kicking off each episode, you will start to see folks from our incident responders, researchers, analysts, and everyone in between, but the scope of this podcast will remain as it is. It'll focus on delivering threat intelligence with actionable insights, and, of course, we're going to continue to look within our walls at Microsoft and also the wonderful community that we are part of to bring other people on, regardless of what organization they are in, and highlight the research and impact that we see across the threat landscape. So, going forward, we hope you'll stick with us. I certainly, again, understand there are changes afoot. There'll be different voices. And the level of personality that Sherrod always brings to the table is impossible to replace. So, that being said, we will have future episodes coming to you soon. We're also going to be adding in video, so you'll be able to see them on YouTube and some of the other streaming services. But going forward, you'll see new voices, same level of intelligence, just different topics and expansions all the way through AI red teaming, research, and so on and so forth. And I believe our next episode is going to be about some of the threat landscape that we're seeing across email threats. So stay tuned. We appreciate you sticking with us. And, Sherrod, we love you. Thank you so much for being part of this community and building this podcast with us. [ Music ]