Type: Leadership & Executive Strategy

Dr. Sasha Vanterpool (Senior Cyber Workforce Consultant at Skillrex) applies the data-driven "Moneyball" mindset to modern cybersecurity organizations. Just as baseball teams stopped relying on legacy scouting metrics to find undervalued players, security leaders must look beyond traditional credentials like degrees or static certifications and start measuring actual skills intelligence.

Modern organizations spend hundreds of billions annually on "next-gen" security platforms, yet global losses to cyber crime continue to rise exponentially. In this data-driven session, Dr. Jordan Howell (Professor at the University of South Florida & CEO of Ventel) cuts through industry marketing hype to present real, peer-reviewed, empirical evidence connecting corporate infrastructure exposure directly to internal organizational culture.

In this joint presentation, Dr. Marbin Pazos Revilla (Bellini College of AI, Cybersecurity, and Computing) and Dr. Clinton Daniel (Muma College of Business, University of South Florida) detail a case study on their 10+ year workforce pipeline partnership with enterprise security giant Reliaquest. This blueprint covers how the university modernizes its cybersecurity curriculum around the newly updated NIST NICE Cybersecurity Workforce Framework, dropping legacy instructional models to account for autonomous agentic AI disruptions.

True partnership means giving students the keys to the most advanced research toys in the world to solve real-world problems. Join April Augustine and the workforce development team at Idaho National Lab (INL) as they discuss their strategic collaboration with Cyber Florida and academic institutions.

This session explores how executive teams can prepare for and lead through major cyber incidents, with a focus on crisis decision-making, communications, authority structures, and operational readiness during ransomware and breach scenarios. Drawing from real-world experience as a former CISO and incident response leader, the speaker breaks down the difference between prepared and unprepared organizations, showing how confusion around authority, communications, and escalation can dramatically worsen the impact of an attack. The presentation covers executive tabletop exercises, ransomware response strategy, breach communications, cyber insurance coordination, legal and regulatory escalation, vendor and third-party breach scenarios, and the importance of building organizational “muscle memory” through realistic crisis simulations. Real-world examples including Colonial Pipeline, MGM, Caesars, Change Healthcare, and 23andMe are used to illustrate how executive decisions can shape the long-term outcome of a cyber crisis.