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Ryan Macfarlane

Incident Response Practice Lead at TrustedSec and retired FBI cyber agent who led the Counterterrorism Division's Advanced Projects Unit.

Nov 12, 2025

14:58
Can you tell us a little bit about that landscape and how it impacts the way organisations should be thinking about preparing for and responding to incidents? What's the difference in the dynamics when we're seeing those sorts of attacks?
15:12
Yeah, generally nation state actors are more strategic about their targets, right? And they're responding to government directed tasking to achieve some goal, right? So you see a lot of targeting of intellectual property or intelligence collection related to global competition, for example.
15:35
Uh, and we've seen that over the last two decades, you know, it's, you know, those areas are, you know, it's just a different end state from the cyber criminal actors out there.
15:47
And when I started doing this, they.
15:51
They operated differently from criminal actors.
15:55
They had different tool sets.
15:57
They felt differently on the network.
19:22
Yes, all the salt signs.
14:04
Can you tell us a little bit about that landscape and how it impacts the way organisations should be thinking about preparing for and responding to incidents? What's the difference in the dynamics when we're seeing those sorts of attacks?
14:18
Yeah, generally nation state actors are more strategic about their targets, right? And they're responding to government directed tasking to achieve some goal, right? So you see a lot of targeting of intellectual property or intelligence collection related to global competition, for example.
14:42
And we've seen that over the last two decades, you know, it's those areas are, you know, it's just a different end state from the cyber criminal actors out there.
14:54
And when I started doing this.
14:57
they operated differently from criminal actors.
15:01
They had different tool sets.
15:03
They felt differently on the network.

7 MINS LATER

21:59
What have you learned over the years in terms of what has worked well in terms of collaboration between law enforcement and corporate and perhaps lessons to be learned where things didn't work so well?

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