Winning the cyber marathon with Tony Giandomenico

Tony Giandomenico, Senior Director of Product Management, joins Amy to discuss the Talos Threat Hunting launch what he's excited about for the future of cybersecurity, and, of course, his Ironman triathlons.

In the high-speed world of cybersecurity, the difference between a breach and a breakthrough often comes down to endurance. Tony Giandomenico, Senior Director of Product Management with Cisco Talos, joins me to discuss how he balances the intensity of leading major product launches with the grueling discipline of Ironman triathlons. Beyond the technical specs and new threat hunting features, this conversation dives deep into the human side of leadership.

Tony shares his hard-won lessons on the power of communication, the importance of knowing your "why," and how to navigate the complexities of a 30-year career without losing your focus. Amy Ciminnisi: You have been in the thick of the cyber security world for a while now, and a lot of things have shifted in this field. So what has been the biggest surprise for you, and what keeps you excited about leading the charge on the product side? Tony Giandomenico: Well, I would probably say that the biggest shift over the last six months has been the increase rate of the capabilities of these frontier models.

I'm the first one not to jump on the bandwagon of this stuff, because I've been doing this for about 30 plus years or so, but I think this feels a little different. The capabilities are increasing, and I think what that means to cybersecurity is a big shift. How do we deal with all that? From the adversary side, they're actually breaking in the networks like they typically do. They're moving laterally within the environment. They're evading different types of security controls. Finding vulnerabilities, exploiting those vulnerabilities, all of that stuff.

It's also going to be supercharged on the defensive side. Of course, you don't bring a knife to a gun fight, right? You're going to use the same AI technology — you know, the same frontier models — to speed things up there as well. From the product management side, I think we're going to see the things that we would have previously seen five years down the road a lot sooner. And that's kind of that's what kind of excites me about everything — that opportunity to explore the art of possibility is a lot more at your fingertips where it wasn't necessarily before.

AC: We specifically lined this episode up with the Cisco Talos Threat Hunting launch, which you played a major role in. For people who aren't familiar, can you explain what it is? TG: Threat hunting is where we're looking for different types of threats that are circumventing our existing security control alerts, detection mechanisms, and so on. When defenders invest in these different types of technologies that are automatically detecting alerts or threats in your environment, the challenge that they have is the sensitivity meter.