Presentations

Presented by: Matthew Gracie — The Human Centered Investigation Playbook (HCIP) standard is a YAML-based syntax for writing investigation playbooks that correspond to a particular alert, artifact, or attack. The goal is to have an investigation methodology that both guides the analyst and also integrates into defensive tooling to make necessary data easily available during the investigation. In this presentation I will discuss the standard, explore its purpose and use cases, and demonstrate its functionality in a free and open monitoring platform.

Presented by: Steve Dyson — In today’s rapidly evolving threat landscape, organizations are under increasing pressure to maintain robust cybersecurity postures while ensuring compliance with newly implemented regulations such as the SEC Cybersecurity Rules, CMMC, and DORA. This presentation explores how proactive defensive measures, including the use of the Cyber Defense Matrix and the MITRE ATT&CK framework, DeTT&CT, & D3fend projects, can significantly enhance an organization’s ability to align security operations with compliance requirements. By mapping capabilities, identifying gaps, and systematically organizing security functions, these tools not only strengthen cyber defenses but also provide structured approaches to meeting regulatory controls. Attendees will gain insight into integrating these frameworks into their cybersecurity strategy to improve visibility, accountability, and resilience while maintaining audit-readiness and governance alignment.

Presented by: Nimish Sharma, Shivam Dhar, Niveadita Razdan — Serverless abstracts bare metal, not the burden. In fast, event-driven clouds, threats often outpace traditional controls. Misconfigurations, fuzzy trust boundaries, and brittle integrations open new attack surfaces: vulnerable libraries, leaky secrets, wildcard IAM, and misconfigured triggers. In this immersive 3-hour workshop, you will build a hands-on cloud lab with serverless components to design and secure an end-to-end AI pipeline using LynxLab. Through gamified, branch-by-branch challenges, teams will identify vulnerabilities, trace real-world attack paths, and map findings to STRIDE and OWASP Serverless categories. We will examine how ephemeral execution, event chains, and implicit trust can be abused, and how to close those gaps without slowing delivery. You will leave with practical patterns, and defensive strategies for identity, secrets, triggers, and observability, plus a focused playbook to reduce blast radius and ship resilient, modern serverless applications.

Presented by: Andrew Bullen — Prompt injection remains the elephant in the AI Security room—there’s no deterministic defense, yet the urgency driving AI adoption means many teams feel forced to either accept the risk or hobble their agents with overly restrictive policies. But there’s a third path: containment. In this talk, I’ll walk through the architectural guardrails Stripe adopted to protect our agent platform, showing how you can give agents powerful tools while ensuring minimal damage if prompt injection occurs. I’ll cover strategies for preventing data exfiltration through controlled egress, share UI patterns for human confirmation flows to balance oversight with usability, and demonstrate how to enforce these guardrails at CI-time using tool annotations.

Presented by: Kat Fitzgerald — Cloud security shouldn’t feel like deciphering a spellbook written during a power outage. This talk starts by breaking down the core concepts of cloud architecture and access control using clear, memorable analogies—yes, “Pizza as a Service” makes an appearance. In just a few minutes, the audience will understand how IAM, org policies, and service boundaries compare to the on-prem world, and how attackers use these same models to find weak spots. Then it’s showtime. We dive into real-world cloud misconfigurations and the attack paths they create, with a mix of live demos (plus recorded backups, because the demo gods can be fickle) and open-source tools that anyone can use. We’ll walk through everything from “accidental” data exposure to the infamous public GitHub token that launched hundreds of crypto-mining VMs without detection. And yes, why cryptominers are often just the decoy for something far more concerning.

Presented by: Jenko Hwong, Chris Ryan — What started as a Cloud Village CTF at DC33 turned into a private API for CloudShell with persistent access to free compute, networking, and storage. We’ll look at overcoming console/non-API/API barriers, automation of a non-API service, IAM obfuscation, logging/monitoring, user lock out, overcoming file/container resets, and backdoors.

Presented by: Shawn Thomas — Most security teams are stuck in reactive mode: alerts fire, analysts scramble, incidents get closed, rinse and repeat. But what if there was a way to think about detection and response as a continuous cycle that actually gets better over time? The TDR Lifecycle is a five-stage model I developed and refined over years of building and leading threat detection and response teams. It maps everything a detection and response program needs to consider: from tool management and use case development all the way through automation and feeding controls back through the business. This isn’t a vendor pitch or theoretical framework, it’s a practical model you can steal and adapt for your own organization. Whether you’re building a program from scratch or trying to mature an existing one, this talk will give you a mental map for identifying gaps and prioritizing where to focus your efforts.

Presented by: Grey Fox — Going AFK (away from keyboard) means a lot of things. For an infosec worker, hacker, technologist–whatever your flavour–exercising their First Amendment rights these days, it means serious preparation and answering hard questions. It means finding the safest and most survivable course of action for yourself and your group. Security-minded planning for events demands site surveys, proper clothing and tools, digital privacy, escape and evasion, and checklists for all of it. Let’s cover some of these essentials and give ourselves a head start.

Presented by: Nimish Sharma, Shivam Dhar — Managed compute removes bare metal infrastructures, not responsibility. In FaaS platforms, speed and elasticity make it easy to misconfigure, and ephemeral function chains with granular integrations create exposure points that legacy controls miss. This technical session unpacks real attacker tradecraft against function-based apps, including dependency flaws, credential leakage, overly broad permissions, and unsafe event bindings. Rather than slideware, we focus on field-tested playbooks: threat mapping, least-privilege design, guardrails for events, secrets handling, and observability that actually catches misuse while teams keep shipping. Built for engineers and defenders working on highly automated stacks where sightlines are thin and blast radius can grow quickly, the talk also introduces LynxLab, our open lab that lets you build a mini FaaS pipeline, probe it with realistic kill chains, and practice concrete countermeasures to harden managed runtimes without losing delivery speed.

Presented by: Teddy Katayama, Charles Adams — Organizations of all sizes face a growing but largely invisible threat: sensitive data exposures across their supply chain that are openly accessible on the clear web without their awareness. Through real-world disclosures and industry-wide research, we reveal how supply chain leakage has become normalized through misplaced trust in contracted vendors and disclosure processes that fail to enforce third-party accountability. Larger organizations often accept exposure as an implicit risk, while smaller organizations assume vendors follow best practices. Existing OSINT platforms frequently reinforce this gap by prioritizing internal visibility while overlooking externally discoverable data. This talk reframes OSINT-driven leak discovery as more than evidence collection. We demonstrate how pairing exposure evidence with clear threat theory and actionable remediation guidance transforms vulnerability disclosures into effective risk-reduction outcomes.

Presented by: Sharon Shama — How comfortable are you knowing your company is using custom LLMs, like CustomGPT, with zero visibility into the sensitive data flowing through them? Organizations are racing to adopt AI, creating new blind spots faster than they can secure them. The reality is hundreds of shadow AI instances where employees inadvertently expose company IP and PII daily. This session introduces GCI (CustomGPT Compliance Insights), a new open-source tool built to solve this exact visibility gap. We will jump directly into the research behind the tool, dissecting the attack surface of administrative APIs and the specific regex patterns we developed to hunt for secrets in unstructured chat logs. We will demonstrate how the tool identifies high-risk exposures, from hardcoded credentials to sensitive PII, that standard DLP solutions often miss. You will leave with the source code in hand and a practical method to run your own audits and minimize these risks immediately.

Presented by: Derek Chamorro — Traditional SIEM platforms excel at detecting network intrusions and OS-level threats, but they’re fundamentally blind to attacks living in GPUs, BMCs, and out-of-band management planes. As AI/ML workloads scale, attackers increasingly exploit this hardware-layer blind spot to steal models, achieve persistent access via firmware implants, and maintain presence even after incident response. This talk exposes what your SIEM is missing and provides a practical roadmap to close the gap. We’ll cover GPU telemetry (DCGM), BMC logs (IPMI/Redfish), and out-of-band monitoring, why they matter for security, the challenges of integration (protocol chaos, network isolation, data volume), and a three-layer reference architecture (Collection → Normalization → Correlation) you can implement today. Hardware-layer persistence is real. Your SIEM doesn’t see it. Learn what you’re missing.

Presented by: Jason Blanchard — Are you looking for a new role and unsure how to job hunt in 2026? Jason Blanchard has helped thousands rethink how they approach job hunting, with more than 300 people reporting they landed new roles using his methodology. This presentation is packed with live demos and practical advice on finding roles you actually want to apply for, refining your resume to highlight your experience, skills, and education, identifying where to apply, and finding internal advocates to help shepherd your resume to the right people. You’ll also learn how to track your search without losing your mind and how to manage the emotional side of job hunting. Learn to job hunt like a hacker.

Presented by: Stryker — Ready to hack a threat intelligence platform (TIP) together with ChatGPT, Feedly, Airtable, Zapier, and duct tape vibes? In this interactive, hands-on presentation, I’ll walk you through how to assemble your first minimum viable TIP using whatever no- or low-cost tools you’ve got on hand. Bring an Internet-capable laptop if you’d like to follow along, and we’ll:

• Pin down why you need a TIP—are you drowning in docs and articles, still cutting and pasting indicators, or just trying to appease the corporate gods who think it’s a good idea?
• Seed your intel feeds with customized primary sources while discovering hidden RSS feeds together.
• Perfect your OSINT summary prompt engineering for the Gen AI bot of your choice—with a few experiments showing common failure points.

You’ll walk away with war stories, a functional schematic to assemble your own TIP, and a community ready to help you iterate—no six-figure surcharge required.

Presented by: Robert M. Lee — Robert M. Lee is CEO and co-founder of Dragos, the global leader in Operational Technology (OT) cybersecurity. The Dragos Platform protects critical infrastructure and industrial operations worldwide. For the World Economic Forum, Robert is a frequent speaker and serves on the cyber resilience subcommittees for Oil & Gas and Electricity. He is a SANS Fellow and on boards for the International Society of Automation and National Cryptologic Foundation. Robert was a U.S. Air Force Cyber Warfare Operations Officer tasked to NSA, and subsequently helped lead the investigation into the 2015 attack on Ukraine’s power grid. He continues his public service as Lieutenant Colonel in the Army National Guard, designing and leading OT cybersecurity and response.

Presented by: John Aron — A borderless war beyond the battefield cost us beyond $600 billion dollars worth of damages. Is there an end in sight? Is a cyber letter of marque possible to minimize risk? The changing nature of the Department of Defense/Department of War, the switch to offensive policy when the US makes cyber strategy changes, at what cost to you and the nation?

Presented by: Anuj Soni — This hands-on workshop introduces the fundamental techniques analysts use to safely examine malicious Windows executables inside an isolated lab. Participants will learn how to build a dedicated malware analysis environment, follow an efficient and repeatable workflow, perform static inspection of suspicious files, observe real behavior during execution, and explore code for deeper insight. Through guided exercises and live demonstrations, you’ll see how reverse engineering deepens your understanding of adversaries, their goals, and what to look for on a compromised system.

Presented by: Kevin Figueroa, Dickson Kwong — Modern cyber operations generate massive, high‑dimensional data, alerts, asset inventories, scan results, DNS and TLS telemetry, threat intel feeds, and more—yet most teams still force this data into legacy, row‑and‑column patterns that were never designed for AI‑driven analysis. This talk presents a practical approach to modernizing, vectorizing, and visualizing your cyber operations data using the Qdrant vector database as the core of a next‑generation threat intelligence and recon platform.

Presented by: h00die, Joel Garcia — Metasploit has had persistence for a long time, however it’s always been lackluster. In July 2025 a complete overhaul of the persistence system began, introducing standardization across all platforms. Since then many new additional techniques have been created, especially on Windows platforms. This talk will discuss the new standardizations and how they effect users, look at the new techniques which have been added, and show how they can be utilized with live demonstrations. Are you a blue teamer? Comes see what the other side is doing and know what to look for in your logs to find these techniques.

Presented by: Kiara Deloatch — Traditional DFIR assumes that compromise produces artifacts, failures, or clearly malicious inputs. AI systems challenge that assumption. Models can be trained, deployed, and perform “as expected” while still producing harmful, biased, or manipulated outcomes. This talk explores how data poisoning and manipulation in AI systems often target results rather than content, making traditional IOC-based detection ineffective. Using a DFIR mindset, the session focuses on how investigators can identify behavioral, temporal, and statistical indicators that suggest something is wrong even when no individual data point appears malicious. Attendees will leave with a practical framework for thinking about AI investigations, emphasizing baselining, change correlation, and forensic readiness over perfect attribution.

Presented by: Chris Maenner — Startups ship fast, often faster than their security practices can keep up. As someone who’s built and secured platforms at growth-stage companies, I’ve watched teams accumulate risk while chasing product-market fit. Then they add AI workloads, and the attack surface explodes. This talk bridges two worlds: the pragmatic security challenges of scaling startups and the technical reality of securing AI workloads in Kubernetes. We’ll cover common failure modes: identity sprawl, over permissioned service accounts, implicit trust between services and how security practitioners can enable velocity instead of blocking it. Then we’ll dive into service mesh patterns for AI workloads:

• Identity-first security with mTLS and SPIFFE
• East-west traffic controls and fine-grained authorization
• Model access isolation and prompt protection
• Observability for detecting AI service abuse

All examples come from production Kubernetes environments. Attendees will leave with patterns they can implement.

Presented by: Alton Henley — Small municipalities are ransomware’s sweet spot: essential services, political pressure to restore operations, limited IT staff, and budgets that prioritize potholes over patches. While headlines focus on attacks against major cities, it’s the towns under 50,000 residents (thousands of them) that attackers quietly exploit. This talk examines why small local governments are disproportionately targeted, what their environments actually look like (spoiler: it’s bad), and what a single overworked IT person can realistically do to defend them. Drawing on real incidents and the operational realities of municipal IT, we’ll cover practical defensive strategies that don’t require enterprise budgets or dedicated SOCs.

Presented by: Kaitlin Seng — Containers and virtual machines are both central to modern cloud infrastructure but have fundamentally different security boundaries by design. Virtual machines (VMs) provide better isolation, but can be more cumbersome and less portable. Containers have become the common choice for workloads due to their flexibility and lightweight footprint, but their security properties are often misunderstood or oversimplified. MicroVMs challenge this tradeoff by providing container-like minimal environments with VM-grade isolation. In this talk, we’ll start with a security-focused comparison of containers and traditional VMs, and then we’ll dive into microVMs and how their design allows them to reduce overhead while preserving hardware-backed isolation. Attendees will leave with a better understanding of the tradeoffs between containers and virtual machines and how that knowledge can impact infrastructure design choices.

Presented by: Erich Kron — Every cybersecurity pro dreams of the perfect smart home with automated lights, sensors everywhere, dashboards that rival NASA, and a doorbell cam that can predict your partner’s mood. In reality? It gets messy. Automations fire at 3AM, an ESP32 dies whenever someone microwaves popcorn, and suddenly your house is generating more alerts than a misconfigured SIEM. In this session, Erich Kron shares the wins, fails, and “why is it doing THAT?” moments from building a smart home with Home Assistant, ESPHome, LEDs, and DIY sensors from the depths of the internet. You’ll learn how to design a secure, reliable setup without creating Skynet Lite, the difference between automation and over-automation, which DIY sensors are actually useful (including for chickens), and why segmentation, encryption, and patching matter. You’ll leave with templates, real-world tips, and enough cautionary tales to keep your home from becoming an IoT haunted house, while building one that works… most of the time.

Presented by: Tim Pappa, Vladimir Drinkman — This presentation by a former FBI profiler and a Russian former cybercriminal felon challenge some of the beliefs and attitudes you might have about how cybercrime gangs find people willing to help their businesses, and how the motivations of everyday people are closer to cybercriminals than we might imagine. We examine cybercriminal gangs that offer support services to its gang affiliates and partners. While some observers have characterized this support as marketing ploys, the use of legitimate service industries is largely unknown. This presentation also contributes to crime convenience theory in cybercriminal and criminology contexts, suggesting that this framework for explaining why people not involved in crime become willing to support crime, might also reveal similar pathways in motivation between cybercriminals and people not involved in crime.

Presented by: TheClockworkBird — Cicada 3301 stands as a powerful icon in the digital age, and one which has also served as a potent attack surface for threat actors and novel misinformation strategies for over a decade. This talk aims to educate the public on the threat of ARG-attack surfaces through the lens of community experience, identifying the vulnerabilities, attack strategies employed, and offensive defense needed to curtail large scale misinformation in info-rich environments. Along the way we will quash conspiracies, liquify reality, and gain a niche perspective into the power of ARGS.

Presented by: Pujita Sahni, Jerry Jones IV — Security vulnerabilities are expensive to fix in production but cheap to catch early. ASH (Automated Security Helper) is a free, open-source security orchestration engine that integrates multiple scanning tools—SAST, SCA, IaC, and secrets detection—into a single, unified workflow. In this session, you’ll discover how ASH leverages lightweight tools like Bandit, Semgrep, Checkov, and Grype, presenting them as a single unified solution, to identify security issues across Python, JavaScript, Terraform, CloudFormation, and more. We’ll explore two of ASH’s execution modes (local, container), its new Python-based architecture with UV package management, and how to use it to scan files, directories, or entire projects. Whether you’re a developer, DevOps engineer, or security professional, you’ll leave with practical knowledge to implement automated security scanning in your projects today.

Presented by: Sweta Deivanayagam — In this talk, we will discuss how AI is revolutionizing the critical activity of threat modeling. Threat modeling helps organizations identify, prioritize, and mitigate risks before they are exploited. Traditionally, it has been a manual, expertise-driven process, which can be slow and prone to human blind spots. Artificial intelligence is now transforming threat modeling by automating data analysis, generating attack scenarios, and continuously updating risk assessments as environments evolve. We will discuss a sample threat modeling scenario and different AI tools like ChatGPT and Gemini we can use to create a threat model. We will go over some of the pitfalls in using AI for automated analysis. Attendees will hear about AI hallucinations, context windows, non-determinism and how those affect threat modeling and risk analysis output. We will go over some techniques of improving the accuracy of AI threat modeling using grounded data, feedback loops and targeted prompts.

Presented by: Andre Piazza — Breaking news creates perfect crime scenes. Natural disasters. Political scandals. Economic shocks. When headlines explode, AI-powered scammers weaponize the chaos at machine speed, spinning up phishing sites, fake donation pages, and impersonation campaigns before defenders can react. This talk reveals how threat actors exploit news cycles with AI and how predictive intelligence beats them to the punch. By mapping behavioral patterns across internet infrastructure, we identify scam infrastructure during preparation, not activation, anticipating attacks by days or weeks. Internet-scale behavioral predictive AI then disrupts this malicious infrastructure before activation, enabling preemptive blocking and takedowns. Attacks get neutralized before victims exist, dramatically increasing criminal costs and slashing their ROI.

Presented by: Jessie Jamieson — Integer factorization (breaking down whole numbers into prime factors) is something computers do constantly, yet it’s surprisingly hard. Have you ever considered why this is the case? This talk traces integer factorization from Fermat’s 17th-century breakthrough to today’s General Number Field Sieve (GNFS). We’ll demystify how this mathematical monster works without drowning in theory, and we’ll explore notable moments in cryptographic history and the relationship between factorization algorithms and cybersecurity. Although the GNFS is an absurdly complex mathematical topic, this talk will make it accessible to everyone. Fair warning: there WILL be mathematics in this talk… but there will also be history, hacking, and horseplay. No prior math experience required—just a healthy respect for algorithms and some patience. I promise this will be way cooler than your high school algebra class (and yes, I realize how low that bar might already be).

Presented by: Caleb Kinney — Teams celebrate when their Mean Time to Remediate (MTTR) drops until it suddenly spikes after fixing old vulnerabilities. That looks like failure, but it’s actually progress and exposure went down. MTTR measures how quickly work closes, not the health of what remains open. Mean Open Vulnerability Age (MOVA) fills that gap by showing the average age of open vulnerabilities at a given point in time, revealing true backlog risk. This talk defines MTTR and MOVA in clear, practical terms and walks through a simple simulation comparing two common fix strategies: newest-first and oldest-first. MOVA brings that missing dimension by translating backlog health into data leaders can act on. Attendees will see why MTTR alone can mislead, how MOVA exposes hidden risk, and how combining both metrics gives security teams and leaders a more accurate picture of progress and exposure.

Presented by: Mackenzie Jackson — In 2026, we saw a sharp increase in large-scale, professional, and highly sophisticated software supply chain attacks. The Aikido Security research team was the first to uncover multiple major incidents, including the Shai-Hulud self-propagating worm, the largest mass compromise of npm packages involving debug and chalk, and even the compromise of an official XRP cryptocurrency SDK. These weren’t isolated mistakes; they signaled a fundamental shift in how supply chain attacks are designed and scaled. In this talk, we break down what these real-world discoveries revealed about modern attacker tradecraft: how worms spread, why tokens are the real target, and how trust is systematically exploited across registries, repositories, IDE extensions, and CI pipelines. Together, these cases show how supply chain attacks have become industrialized, and why the ecosystem is struggling to keep up.

Presented by: Anurag Swarnim Yadav, Joseph N. Wilson — Post-quantum cryptography (PQC) is often discussed as a future problem, but organizations are already exposed today due to long-lived cryptographic assets and the risk of “harvest now, decrypt later.” While many systems claim PQC readiness, few teams can answer a basic question: where is cryptography actually used, and which systems are still vulnerable? This talk introduces a practical, discovery-first approach to PQC using Asset and Cryptographic Discovery and Inventory (ACDI). We demonstrate an open-source scanner that identifies cryptography across common services such as TLS and SSH, analyzes certificates and key algorithms, and highlights post-quantum-relevant weaknesses caused by legacy protocols or long-lived trust assets. We then show how these findings map to NIST’s PQC standards and enable teams to prioritize migration, adopt hybrid cryptography, and reduce risk incrementally. The session avoids heavy mathematics and focuses on actionable visibility and migration strategies.