The episode offers listeners a behind-the-scenes look at the making of "Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar," providing insights into the intersection of cybersecurity and entertainment. It showcases the passion and creativity involved in bringing a comic book to life and highlights the support and camaraderie within the cybersecurity community.
Guest: Allan Liska, Owner at Green Archer Comics
On Linkedin | https://www.linkedin.com/in/allan2
On Twitter | https://twitter.com/uuallan
____________________________
Host: Sean Martin, Co-Founder at ITSPmagazine [@ITSPmagazine] and Host of Redefining CyberSecurity Podcast [@RedefiningCyber]
On ITSPmagazine | https://www.itspmagazine.com/itspmagazine-podcast-radio-hosts/sean-martin
____________________________
This Episode’s Sponsors
Imperva | https://itspm.ag/imperva277117988
Pentera | https://itspm.ag/penteri67a
___________________________
Episode Notes
In this episode of Redefining CyberSecurity, host Sean Martin chats with Allan Liska, a cybersecurity professional and comic book writer. Allan shares his journey of creating the comic book series "Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar," which follows the adventures of a cyber insurance investigator battling ransomware. While the focus is on entertaining and escapism, there is also an educational component, keeping the technical aspects true to life without boring readers.
Allan discusses the catharsis and wish fulfillment he experiences through the comic book medium, allowing the protagonist to do things that are not possible in real-life cybersecurity cases. He highlights the importance of problem-solving and investigation, drawing parallels between incident response professionals and the character's approach to challenges.
The conversation delves into the process of turning the story into a comic book format, including hiring artists, finding a publisher, and running a successful Kickstarter campaign.
Allan expresses his gratitude for the support he received from the cybersecurity community and the challenges of running a small business.
They explore the creative process of adapting technical descriptions into a visually appealing comic book format, emphasizing the need for an independent editor to ensure the story flows visually. Allan reflects on the intersection of cybersecurity and storytelling, discussing the theme of wish fulfillment and the heroic role of threat intelligence analysts.
About the Comic Book
A new comic book series featuring Johnny Dollar, the star of the 1940s - 60s radio serial of the same name! He is back fighting ransomware and more!
Written by Allan Liska, the comic is based on CBS Radio’s popular serialized drama of the same name that ran from 1949 through 1962. Known as “the man with the action-packed expense account,” Johnny Dollar has been reimagined and brought into the digital age to fight ransomware as a hard-nosed cyber insurance investigator.
In this first issue, Johnny Dollar is called to Johnstown, Pennsylvania to investigate a ransomware attack against Gotham Steel. The insurance company is concerned that there may be a company insider helping the ransomware group. Johnny quickly realizes something is off with this case and must race to find the insider, while avoiding attacks from Russian thugs, before the company caves in and pays the ransom.
Watch this and other videos on ITSPmagazine's YouTube Channel
Redefining CyberSecurity Podcast with Sean Martin, CISSP playlist:
📺 https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLnYu0psdcllS9aVGdiakVss9u7xgYDKYq
ITSPmagazine YouTube Channel:
📺 https://www.youtube.com/@itspmagazine
Be sure to share and subscribe!
Resources
Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar #1: https://www.greenarcher.io/product-page/yours-truly-johnny-dollar-1
Learn more about the history of Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar: https://www.johnnydollar.io/about
____________________________
To see and hear more Redefining CyberSecurity content on ITSPmagazine, visit:
https://www.itspmagazine.com/redefining-cybersecurity-podcast
Are you interested in sponsoring an ITSPmagazine Channel?
👉 https://www.itspmagazine.com/sponsor-the-itspmagazine-podcast-network
Please note that this transcript was created using AI technology and may contain inaccuracies or deviations from the original audio file. The transcript is provided for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a substitute for the original recording, as errors may exist. At this time, we provide it “as it is,” and we hope it can be helpful for our audience.
_________________________________________
[00:00:00] Sean Martin: Hello, everybody. You're very welcome to a new episode of Redefining Cybersecurity here on ITSP Magazine. This is Sean Martin, your host, where I get to talk about all kinds of things infosec, uh, from the programmatic level and operational level. And sometimes it's important to take a step back. And look at things differently.
Um, as you know, Marco, my co founder and I, we like to tell stories, uh, which get people to think and my guest today is, has done and is doing just that. Alan Liska, thanks for being on the show.
[00:00:36] Allan Liska: Thanks for having me, Sean. I'm really excited to be on.
[00:00:40] Sean Martin: Yeah. And I can't, uh, I'm trying to recall, uh, if it was a message or a lot of my inspiration comes from posts mainly on LinkedIn, but, uh, somehow I, it was probably actually PR.
I think we connected through, uh, through PR, um, to a comic book that you've written and it's a series, uh, that you've put together. So we're going to talk a bit about that and who it's for and why you wrote it and, and why it's cool. And from what I've seen, it's. It's pretty special. It's really, really amazing.
So we're going to dig into all of that, uh, before we get into the comic book itself, though, a few words from you, Alan, about, uh, kind of your journey, uh, into cybersecurity. I don't know where, where you started and, and, uh, kind of how you progressed to where you are. So a little bit of background for folks so they know who Who Ellen is, they hear us talk.
[00:01:36] Allan Liska: Sure. So, uh, I am an accidental cybersecurity professional. Um, I was a sociology major in college at University of Maryland. Um, and I, my first job out of school was at the Survey Research Center and they assigned me to be the network administrator. 'cause I was the only one who was willing to crawl under the desk and plug in the token ring connections.
Um, so that's how I learned networking. Uh, then I went to go work for a company called Uunet Technologies. Uh, at the time, one of the world's largest ISPs. Um, and I was a router jockey. I handled configuring our backbone and our dial up configurations, did some DNS work, et cetera. Um, I moved from that side over to the datacenter side and we got hit by code red and I was on the Unix side of the datacenter.
Um, so I didn't have anything to do with the Windows side, but apparently we weren't patching the Windows. To be honest, we probably weren't patching the Unix side as quickly as we should have either. Um, and so very quickly I learned, you know, how to do, uh, you know, a sort of a crash course and incident response.
And when Unionet was bought out by a bunch of companies and eventually WorldCom, laid off 17, 000 employees, it at the time was the world's biggest, uh, corporate malfeasance ever. Um, uh, uh, you know, since then it's been eclipsed many times over, but, uh, but, but back then it was huge. Um, And the friend of mine worked for a small company called Riptek.
They were a managed services security provider. And he asked me if I wanted to come and configure firewalls. And that was better than being unemployed. So I did that. And then I became a SOC analyst and, uh, went to go work for the government for a little bit, doing security things. Left the government and became an intelligence analyst on the outside first for eyesight partners.
We got acquired by FireEye And so I left after a little bit of time with FireEye and now work for a company called Recorded Future So it's been kind of a lot all over the place but you know just happened because I was The victim of a mass worm attack that I got it more much much more into security
[00:04:04] Sean Martin: Yes, and I think our paths kind of weaved and crossed, uh, a few times in there.
Uh, I was at Symantec when we, when we bought, uh, RipTek and I was building the SIM product, which we then kind of, we tried to merge the, the RipTek tech and the SIM, Symantec SIM tech together to build. Uh, SOC that could be managed and, uh, that's probably another story altogether. But, uh, yeah, I mean, a great journey and recorded future.
He's a great company now too. So, um, Congrats on working with them. We have some good friends over there. Uh, Charity Wright is one of, one of our closest friends. She's fantastic and talking about intelligence.
[00:04:45] Allan Liska: Yeah. Charity is brilliant and amazing. And I'm in all of everything that she's accomplished, you know, super impressive.
[00:04:53] Sean Martin: Yep. Love it. Love it. So, uh, a great journey into, into, well, networking then to cyber. And, um, I could, I could go off on all kinds of tangents that, uh, it seems we, we often forget about the networking piece in cyber these days.
[00:05:10] Allan Liska: Oh, yeah. Very well. You know, it's funny.
[00:05:12] Sean Martin: Let's just focus on the app layer and then the, and the, uh, the virtual, virtualized layer.
[00:05:18] Allan Liska: I was explaining to one of our new analysts what the finger protocol was. And they were shocked that that existed as a protocol. You mean you could just send a notice and and and get all the information on the server? And I'm like, yeah, we just used to hand that stuff out left and right. Um, you know, so yes, it's very much, uh, A lot that gets forgotten and not everybody needs to know the network layer, but, but you do need part of that depending on what you're doing in cybersecurity.
And I do think it is important to have that, um, that knowledge base.
[00:05:55] Sean Martin: Absolutely. So many abstraction layers. You have to know them as well as the underlying pieces. But, um, we're not, we're not here to talk about that. Maybe you'll come back and we can, we can wrap about networking and security as a separate topic.
[00:06:08] Allan Liska: I am at your disposal. Before I got into ransomware, um, Uh, like I loved obscure protocols, finding weird vulnerabilities in NTP and DNS, et cetera. I am happy I could sit and talk to you for an hour on that and put everybody listening to sleep.
[00:06:25] Sean Martin: All right. Well, well, maybe I can help keep them awake and you can, you can counteract me, but, uh, I'd be very open to that conversation.
I suspect our audience would love that as well. So we'll, we'll make that happen. You've already made something else really cool happen. So tell us about, uh, yours truly, Johnny dollar. Some folks, as they hear me speak, those words may or may not recognize them. So tell us, tell us the backdrop, the background, uh, behind what.
Yours truly, Johnny Dollars.
[00:07:01] Allan Liska: So, Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar was a radio serial that ran from 1939 to 1962. Um, and, uh, Johnny Dollar was a freelance cyber, uh, freelance insurance investigator. Excuse me, I gave away the, uh, the ending there. Um, and, uh, he traveled around the world. Solving problems, uh, you know, solving cases for, for various insurance companies.
And I was introduced to them because where I live in Washington, DC for decades, um, every Sunday night, our, uh, local NPR station runs what they call the big radio broadcast where they play all these old radio serials. And I was a terrible student in high school. So Sunday night, I was like spending three hours getting all my homework done that I should have been working on over the weekend.
Um, and I would listen to that to keep me company. And my favorite were the Johnny dollar stories. And I especially loved his tagline, which is the man with the action packed expense account. I had no idea what that was when I was in high school. Sadly, doing incident response for many years, I'm painfully familiar with what an expense account is.
I can't say it's always action packed, but I am very familiar with the, uh, with the expense account concept now. Um,
And what was fascinating is, as I talked to other people in incident response and other places, so many of them had that tie to Johnny Dollar, whether they listen to it, you know, when they're not not necessarily when they're growing up, but they may have listened to it on radio programs like I did. Or now the episodes are freely available as podcasts and on YouTube channels and so on.
And that, you know, for a lot of people that action packed expense account resonated with them. Um, and so I did some research and it turns out the way Johnny dollar, because it was a radio broadcast and the way copyrights are set up in the U S um, radio broadcast before 1972 weren't copyrightable. So Johnny dollar itself is in the public domain.
Um, and I'm like, Well, he would make a really cool comic book character. Um, we could bring him in and make him instead of an insurance investigator, a cyber insurance investigator, and fighting ransomware guys, which are, I feel like in some ways, ransomware groups are the modern gangsters, you know, the kind of villain he would have gone up against in the 40s and 50s.
[00:09:38] Sean Martin: Yeah, super cool. And yeah, there's an about page, uh, On your website that will include a link to so people can kind of get a get an overview that and there's a little documentary as well. And so now back to well, presumably, I don't think you directly said it, but you've written a comic book Johnny Dollar are used to really Johnny Dollar, which is all about cyber insurance and fighting ransomware, which brings us back to the ransomware connection.
So. I presume in a lot of your work, you cover a lot of ransomware. You've, you've seen a lot of things.
[00:10:18] Allan Liska: So I don't know if you can see the sign behind me that says ransomware sommelier. Uh, that's how I'm known on Twitter. Um, and, uh, my wife had that made for me a few years back. Um, yes, unfortunately I deal with a lot of ransomware.
Um, for the longest time, I. Did it as part of incident response. And now that I'm a researcher, I'm sort of at the next higher level, but I'm very familiar with a lot of different ransomware cases, ransomware tracking, and a lot of the challenges that are going on. And I speak around the world. and to various organizations about what they can do to protect themselves from ransomware.
And so it seemed like a really nice tie in, um, of having a comic book character who was fighting ransomware. And it's obviously an extremely niche market. You're looking at the overlap, you know, the, the sort of the Venn diagram of people who like old time radio shows and people who like cybersecurity and want to read about it in their, Um, so it's a very, uh, very niche market, but we, it seemed to have been, it seems to have so far been really well received in that small market.
And I really appreciate that.
[00:11:29] Sean Martin: Yeah, well, I think what, um, and we, we touched on this before, I think we started recording that. Yes, there are cyber professionals. They care about cyber, but they have a wide range of interest outside of. Cyber and tech and sci fi is one of them. And, and comic books and, and things like that as another area.
And guess what? We, we have partners and husbands and wives and children and nieces and nephews that like comic books, right? And a story is a story. So tell us a little bit about a story. That you've, that you've put together. I know you you've written for, uh, one is one is published due to, due to be available soon, if I'm not mistaken.
So talk, talk to us a little bit about, oh yeah, go ahead.
[00:12:16] Allan Liska: I was just going to say the digital version is available now, the print version was supposed to be available on Tuesday, but there have been some printer issues. I'm learning a lot running a small business. And so hopefully by early next week, I'll have the print version available.
But yeah, so what I did is I took kind of real life cases and change them up. for the comic book. So the first story takes place in a small town. It's a steel mill that gets hit with ransomware attack. Um, and then sort of the twist is there's an insider threat. So the first story is really a whodunit as Johnny has to sift through logs and talk to people and figure out, you know, in an investigative, uh, Uh, said of who, uh, of who the insider threat is and kind of bring them to justice.
Um, I will say that there is a fight with Russian thugs and there's a really good reason why there are Russian thugs in the middle of this small town in Pennsylvania, I promise. Um, but, uh, but, you know, it's a comic book. You can't just have the guy sitting at the computer for 32 pages. You need to throw some action in there.
And then the second story is much more action filled. He's, uh, he goes to Milan and he's got to deal with a ransomware attack at a water plant where the ransomware actors are threatening to adjust the pH balance and, uh, poison the city of Milan if the ransom isn't paid. And so he has to stop that. And the ransomware actor...
Um, behind all of this sort of the overarching criminal is tired of Johnny, uh, uh, thwarting him and, you know, him not getting paid. So he hires a hit man to come after him. And so Johnny has got to fight the hit man and so on. And while we haven't seen that kind of activity, we have seen, for example, ransomware actors attempt to SWAT CEOs of companies that don't pay.
So it's an exaggeration of what's real. But there is a grain of truth to all of, uh, everything that we're doing in the stories. So...
[00:14:24] Sean Martin: Is your what, what's your objective with writing these? Was it, did you have a, a creative burst that you wanted to, to put something down or did you want to educate something, some, uh, group of people or what was kind of the driver for actually doing this?
Because I, I've had a lot of ideas. Not many of them have actually been built. Some of them have, but not all of them.
[00:14:53] Allan Liska: So there is an educational component to it though, but you know, primarily comic books should be about entertaining and escapism. Um, and so while there is certainly an educational component and you can learn some things, we try and keep it as true to life from a technical perspective without, again, without it boring people.
Um, anybody who's done incident response knows that most of incident response is. Sitting in front of a computer for hours on end, wondering when the next meal is going to come. Um, and, but, but there's also a catharsis to it, you know, uh, uh, and, you know, in the first issue, you know, uh, uh, Johnny punching the, uh, the, the, the Russians is actually kind of cathartic for me because it's something that obviously we can't do in real life and we can't do in, in, in a real case.
So there is this catharsis that, that I like of just being able to Hey. If this was a comic book world, no, he's not a superhero, but what would he do that we can't legally do that the lawyers would never allow us to do to, um, uh, do this? So, you know, in the third book where, you know, Johnny goes to Billings, Montana and has to deal with a school under a ransomware attack, um, he launches a DDoS attack to shut down the, uh, ransomware which, again, your lawyer would never allow you to do that.
But, um, but, you know, having that, uh, uh, uh, having that as, um, as an option just kind of feels like cathartic, like, you know, we operate within a certain set of rules and guidelines that the ransomware actors don't have to operate within. And I kind of wanted to change that story. Um, so, so that, that does give me that chance to have a little bit of wish fulfillment, I guess.
Thanks.
[00:16:44] Sean Martin: And. So a bit of superheroism, uh, threat analysts, intelligence, uh, analysts are heroes. In my opinion, the work that they do, um, the capabilities they have, the knowledge they've, uh, they've amassed and how, how to turn that knowledge into action. Even if it's not, not a proactive response, uh, to, to, uh, take down a system with the Niallis service or a bad actor with the Niallis service.
So there's a bit of superheroism in there from my perspective. And I'm curious. Obviously, some of this is probably driven by your, your current or previous work experiences, but cyber insurance, ransomware, also a threat intelligence analyst, how did you, was there something in the original story, a skill set or something?
Is it just the, um, Just the discovery and investigation and that kind of thing that you kind of connected to there, or was there something else there that you said, I want Johnny to, to be a, to be a threat intelligence analyst as well.
[00:18:01] Allan Liska: So to me, um, one of the things that appear always appealed to me about Johnny is you listen to the other radio serials at the time and you know, the, the kind of the go to is, um, uh, um.
How do you shoot your way out of something? There's a golden age comic book character who's terrible that I love. His name is Dynamite Thor and his superpower is he carries a belt of dynamite with him. And so every sol every solution to every problem is how can we drop dynamite on it? And it's terrible, but it's awesome at the same time.
Um, and what I loved about Johnny is the way he thinks through problems. Okay. How can I figure out, you know, cause you know, again, when you're talking about a lot of the other radio serials, you have the, the, the backing of the police, you have the backing of the FBI, you have the backing of. of whatever government entity, um, Johnny never had that.
So he had to figure things out by, by his wits and by his instinct. And I think there is a lot of that in incident response. You don't necessarily have all the answers when you get in and you may be working with a client who doesn't have all the answers. Maybe they don't have good, uh, um, you know, uh, identity and access management or good asset inventory management or, or anything else.
And so you're. You sitting there from scratch trying to piece this back together. And so I do think that there's an investigatory tie in there. Um, that, uh, that, that plays really well.
[00:19:39] Sean Martin: So I want to talk a bit about the, the how, um, Cause I, again, it's, it's one thing to have an idea, another to start take act, taking action on it.
And, um, it's interesting background. You can see my chandelier. Um, but the, yeah, so it's one thing to have an idea, another to take action and another to actually fulfill it. Um, so talk to me a little bit about the process, um, of taking the idea. I suspect you wrote it and then tried to figure out how to publish it both digitally and in print.
Um, so talk, talk through that a little bit and maybe as you can share some, some, uh, feelings you experienced along the way, because I would imagine that it was a bit of a roller coaster. Oh, yeah.
[00:20:35] Allan Liska: Still is.
So I'll say this. It starts with having an amazingly understanding wife. Who, when I came home from a trip one day and said, Hey, I want to write a comic book. Can I take 5, 000 out of savings so I can, um. Uh, start, uh, uh, hiring artists and, and things for the story that I have in my head, like I had the whole arc of what I wanted to do with these four issues in my head, pretty much admittedly, it was a 15 hour flight from Melbourne to San Francisco.
So it was a long flight, but I really kind of sketched out the whole thing that I wanted to do. And, um, and, and, you know, Chris, my wife was like. Sure. Um, I don't know that she was 100 percent behind it, but she's like, okay, this is something you're obviously really excited and passionate about. So then I had to go through the process of hiring artists and that's, you know, interviewing them, looking at their work.
I really wanted a certain. Uh, kind of like a pulp fiction, but also film noir look for the book. I wanted to keep it, even though it's set in modern times, I wanted to keep it kind of grounded in the fifties. So talking to a bunch of different artists, figuring out. What, you know, what they could do, how they could do it.
And then, you know, finding somebody whose page rate I could afford. Um, and then finding cover artists to do the cover, because those are often too different. Finding good letterers, um, finding a great editor who could go through my script, which Was extremely text heavy. Um, uh, you know, because I tried to get a little too explanatory at times and that doesn't work in comic books.
Um, and so finding all of those people, putting the issue together and then kind of going and saying, Hey, um, this is cool. I want to see if we can get some funding. Uh, so starting it up on Kickstarter, um, and. Then reaching out to people, which I hate doing. I'm terrible at marketing and I'm terrible at sales, which is why I'm an intelligence analyst, uh, not a sales engineer or a salesperson.
Um, and reaching out to people saying, Hey, you wanna, you wanna back my thing here, please? Um, uh, uh, you know, and, and, and doing all of that and learning how to do that, and then. Yeah. And then when you talk about the highest, when we hit our funding goal, amazing. And then when we blew past our funding goal, you know, we, we originally tried to raise 3, 500, we wound up raising over 9, 000.
Um, you know, like that's incredible seeing that support. Almost entirely from the cybersecurity community and my mom. Um, uh, yeah, I'm not above thanking my mom. She backed it, you know, as well. Um, you know, cause you know, I was again talking to Chris and I'm like, Hey, um, if, if we're going to get anywhere close to the funding thing, I may just have you put in the last couple hundred bucks we need and then to kind of blow past it and then, you know, getting support from people like you, Sean, who.
Are like, yeah, come on, come on the podcast and talk about it. Uh, I, I know the first. Podcasts that we did where we talked about it way, way back when it was still in the development stage was, um, breaking badness, uh, the domain tools podcast, and, you know, they were really supportive and, and have been. And so I am incredibly appreciative of the cybersecurity community in general for supporting that, which is why things like.
Oh, hey, um, your shipment that was supposed to arrive on Monday and now arrive, may arrive next Monday is very frustrating because I appreciate the belief in, in me, um, and I don't want to let anybody down and I know a week delay is not the end of the world, but it kind of feels like it because, you know, I've told people, hey, we're going to try and get this out by the end of October and now it has to be November and, you know, and so on.
But that's the other thing, finding out all of the terrible things that are involved in running a small business. Thank Just even things like... trying to do multi factor authentication for some, some, you know, basic consumer stuff. And they're like, Oh no, you can't do that. I'm like, but why? Everything should have multi factor authentication enabled.
And, you know, and so seeing the struggles that small businesses have to go through to keep their products secure. And I'm somebody who knows a lot about security, has been a real kind of eye opening moment for me, and I didn't realize how challenging
[00:25:12] Sean Martin: it could be for them. Interesting. Yeah, and I, uh, I mean, it's fascinating that you're uncovering that, because I suspect you know what to ask, what to look for, and what to ask for.
And if your response back is, sorry, we can't. Or we, it's not there yet or whatever. That's, uh, that's quite, can be frustrating if you're, it's a deal breaker for you in some cases. So very interesting. And maybe, maybe that's a. Maybe that's another chat too. Who knows? I want to stick with the book, because you said something interesting.
And I, uh, my mind is technical as well, having built tons of products for Big Yellow and other companies in the past. And everything looks like a project to me, and I want to know how A Z. happens and I like to describe how A to Z happens when I'm, when I'm writing stuff. And so I can completely appreciate you wanting to explain things and, and coming up to a point where the story as written isn't going to work in comic book.
So how, how do you get from, I presume the way your brain works in describing something to the story that actually fits the model for a comic book? Describe that process. How'd you go through that?
[00:26:43] Allan Liska: So, like you, um, I don't know if you can see back there, I've written a bunch of technical books, so I'm used to describing things in technical detail for a technical audience.
And... Um, and that's why having a, uh, uh, uh, independent editor who is not technical. reading through the script and telling me to cut this down, cut this down. Um, I've always been a fan of editors. I love editors because they save me from kind of my own worst, uh, demons when it comes to writing. And, um, because I'm really bad, I'll go down a rabbit hole, um, for a whole chapter that has nothing to do with the point of the book.
And so having that non technical editor that I can kind of go back and forth with, you know, say, hey, no, no, this is, this is the right term. So this is the term we're going to use, but maybe I can reduce the text to this. Um, and then when they say, hey, maybe we need a little more explanation here. That's been really helpful and it's helped me become better.
So doing that for the first script and then, you know, the second script I wrote was better and the third script even better than that and so on. But, you know, having the editor come in behind me and make sure that we're, we're, we're sticking with that. And, and, and that, that has been really good. And the editor that I found, um, literally he goes by the handle comic book editor, but, uh, Brendan is really good at understanding what comic book audiences want.
So he reads the script as if he was reading the comic book and what would excite him and what wouldn't. And he told me, Hey, the story is starting to drag here. You know, this made no sense to me whatsoever. And, and, oh, this is really good. I love this. And, you know, and, and so we can build something that is going to appeal to a general comic book audience while still appealing to a cybersecurity expert and hopefully somebody who loves Johnny Dollar.
[00:28:45] Sean Martin: I love it. So here is the spirit of my. Is there a lesson for analysts in what you just described, um, communicating findings to executive leadership and perhaps even the board or people investigating or insurance companies validating a claim, telling that story in a way they can understand and make sense of?
[00:29:17] Allan Liska: Absolutely. I mean, that is. Uh, you know, sort of analyst 1 0 1 is knowing your audience and knowing how, knowing how, not, not, not, not, and knowing how to approach what you have to say to that audience and how to do that. Um, you know, if you read about this all the time with the presidential daily briefs, right?
The, the different presidents have different ways that they like to consume information. And so when you write your p the the PDB, you have to write it. In the way that that president wants to read it, you know, some like a lot of detail, some like additional links to, to read, some want just a high level summary, um, and they're going to ask their advisors for, for opinion and so on.
And, you know, and that's just obviously the most public example. of, you know, a briefing to your audience, but we all have to do that as intelligence analysts. I speak around the world and if I'm speaking to a CEO or a group of executives, I may have a different level of conversation than if I'm speaking to analysts or if I'm speaking to a government agency versus a bank.
Um, you know, the way I approach and the way I discuss things is going to be very different because you're talking about different people with different goals, different skill sets, et cetera.
[00:30:36] Sean Martin: Yeah, super important. Storytelling, know your audience. Uh, there's, there's a lot to impact there. Um, Alan, I, I feel like I could take a gazillion tangents with you to talk about all kinds of different things.
Um, I think we're, we're kind of at the time where we'll, we'll just, uh, we'll, we'll close this conversation and I'd love to have you back. Certainly talk about some of the other things we discussed. Um, johnny dollar dot IO. Is the website. I'll include links to that and, and of course to, uh, ways to connect with Alan online.
Um, Alan, super great to, to meet you and have this chat. Uh, congratulations on, on the, uh, the comic book one through four. I'm excited to see how that, uh, how that goes and, and hear how the community accepts it and receives it. And, and who knows what, what comes after. Anything else to share? Do you have a, do you have a next arc in mind?
[00:31:41] Allan Liska: So I, I think I want to leave the Johnny Dollar at the fore arc for a while, but actually one of the things that I've learned in this journey is how many people in cybersecurity really love comics and have comic ideas. So I think what I'm going to do early next year Um, open up a call for pages where we can create a comic book anthology from contributors in the cybersecurity industry.
So something simple, one to six pages, you get paid for it. You own the intellectual property rights, but you give us the ability to publish this. And we'll do an anthology of, Comics submitted by people in the cyber security industry. I don't know what we'll call it yet. I'm sure we'll come up with something like, you know, zero day, a comic book, uh, uh, you know, a cybersecurity comic anthology or something like that.
Um, but, but, but, uh, there's so many creative people in this industry and, and to give them an outlet for a chance to do that, I think would be absolutely amazing and, uh, and to see their work the way I've now seen my work in, in, in. in print and published for them to be able to get that joy while I deal with all the heartaches on the back end and the headaches.
Um, you know, I, I think that would be really a great service to the community and something that, that, you know, everybody can enjoy and appreciate.
[00:33:04] Sean Martin: Uh, I love that. Uh, I, I can totally appreciate it. Uh, given what we've done, uh, with, with our podcast network, same, same idea, give, give space and a platform. Uh, for others to bring and tell stories.
And Marco and I deal with the headaches in the back. So, uh, super excited to hear about that when it comes out. So please, please, uh, keep us up to date and love to have you back on as, as you get some of those things working. Um, Alan, again, pleasure to meet you. Pleasure to chat with you. I encourage everybody to check out johnnydollar.
io and, uh, grab the comic books as they, as they come out. I'm interested to see the print, uh, print version as well. So congratulations, Alan, and thanks everybody for, uh, for listening to this. Hopefully you found it useful. I think there's always a connection back to what we do in our professional lives here.
And, uh, I think Alan shared a few of those points for everybody too. To chew on as well. So thanks, uh, Alan, for getting us to think. Thanks everybody for listening, please, uh, share, subscribe, all that fun stuff. And we'll catch you on the next one. Thanks everybody.