The Cybersecurity Defenders Podcast

Join us for this week's Defender Fridays as Chris Sanders, Founder at Applied Network Defense and the Rural Technology Fund, breaks down how analysts actually think through investigations and what separates high performers from the rest.

Show Notes

Join us for this week's Defender Fridays as Chris Sanders, Founder at Applied Network Defense and the Rural Technology Fund, breaks down how analysts actually think through investigations and what separates high performers from the rest.

At Defender Fridays, we delve into the dynamic world of information security, exploring its defensive side with seasoned professionals from across the industry. Our aim is simple yet ambitious: to foster a collaborative space where ideas flow freely, experiences are shared, and knowledge expands.

What We'll Discuss

In this episode, Chris Sanders draws on his background in security operations and cognitive psychology to explore how metacognition shapes investigative performance, and why understanding how you think is one of the most underleveraged skills in the SOC.

Key Topics:

  • Why high-performing analysts ask better questions instead of starting with large chunks of data
  • How diagnostic inquiry (DINQ) was developed by studying senior analysts in action
  • What separates one year of experience repeated twenty times from genuinely diverse experience
  • Why tacit knowledge makes it hard to train new analysts and what to do about it
  • How AI fits into the investigative process and where humans still need to be in the loop
  • Why cybersecurity education has a transfer problem and what other fields like medicine get right
  • What good SOCs have in common and why it comes down to metacognitive awareness

About Our Guest

Chris Sanders is the Founder of Applied Network Defense, a training company focused on analyst and investigative roles, and the Rural Technology Fund, an organization that supports technology education in rural and underserved communities. He holds a doctorate in education and has spent his career at the intersection of cybersecurity and cognitive psychology, including time at school districts, the federal government, and Mandiant.

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Sponsored by LimaCharlie

This episode is brought to you by LimaCharlie, the Agentic SecOps Workspace (ASW), where AI agents operate security infrastructure using the same controls and authority as human analysts, with every action visible, governed, and auditable.

Why LimaCharlie?

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Host: Maxime Lamothe-Brassard - Founder at LimaCharlie

Guest: Chris Sanders - Founder at Applied Network Defense & Rural Technology Fund

What is The Cybersecurity Defenders Podcast?

An accessible but technical podcast about cybersecurity and the people who keep the internet safe. The podcast is built as a series of segments: we will be looking back at the last couple of weeks in cybersecurity news, talking to different people in the industry about areas of their expertise, we're going to break apart some of the TTPs being used by adversaries, and we will even cover a little bit of hacker history.