Type: Security & Threats

Steve Stasiukonis (Founder of Secure Network Intelligence) details how offensive security firms and dark-web adversaries are weaponizing open-source large language models to automate hyper-targeted physical and digital attacks.

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.

Dynamic threat landscapes require a shift from a reactive mindset—punishing an attacker after a breach—to an absolute architectural defense: Deterrence by Design. The objective is to construct systems that are fundamentally too hardened to penetrate, manipulate, or coerce.  In this forward-looking presentation, security strategy consultant Bidemi Ologunde maps the dramatic evolution of global cyber defense.

In this panel discussion, researchers and professors from the University of South Florida (USF) break down a sobering reality: In the next major conflict, there is no rear echelon. Every citizen sits in the cyber foxhole.  The USF panel looks at historical case studies—including the devastating 2017 NotPetya attack on Maersk shipping, pre-invasion wiper attacks in Ukraine, and the 2021 Colonial Pipeline shutdown—to detail exactly how psychological manipulation, deepfakes, and infrastructure cascading failures shape modern hybrid warfare.

Professor John Licato breaks down the dangerous intersection of "legalese" vendor contracts and cyber security operations. While many organizations assume they can simply toss their complex agreements into a tool like ChatGPT or Claude to map out their security liabilities, Professor Licato explains why out-of-the-box LLMs fundamentally struggle with legal reasoning. He uncovers the top operational blind spots of standard AI tools—from hidden chunking issues in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to the emerging security risks of Persistent, Proactive, and Permissive AI Agents operating on the command line.

Michael Rogers (Head of Proactive Resilience at Mox Five) addresses the immense communication challenge that technical leaders face during a crisis. When an incident occurs, a breakdown in communication can cause things to go sideways faster than the malware itself.  Drawing from hundreds of real-world front-line incident response cases—ranging from Akira ransomware to Scattered Spider social engineering—Michael breaks down how to map your boardroom, predict executive responses, and maintain control of the narrative.

Dr. Felix Hernandez (a 25-year IT veteran and CISO) breaks down the alarming reality of modern deepfakes. Moving far beyond old-school Photoshop, today's threat actors are using Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) and advanced open-source tools to execute terrifyingly realistic social engineering attacks. Felix literally transforms himself live on stage into George Clooney and Kendrick Lamar using a standard gaming laptop, demonstrating how effortlessly an attacker can hijack a corporate virtual meeting (like Microsoft Teams or Zoom) using free virtual camera tools like OBS.

In this technical deep dive, Sam Farnan and James Cerkovnik from the Idaho National Laboratory pull back the curtain on Volt Typhoon—the China-nexus cyber espionage campaign actively pre-positioning itself within U.S. critical infrastructure. Unlike traditional threat actors who rely on loud, custom malware, Volt Typhoon completely changes the playbook by "Living off the Land" (LotL). By utilizing native Windows administrative tools and hijacking local SOHO routers as operational relay boxes (ORBs), they blend seamlessly into normal network traffic, rendering standard file-signature defenses entirely useless.

Rich Caminos, Cybersecurity Consultant at CyberCX (now an Accenture company), draws on his extensive 20+ year background in law enforcement, the U.S. Secret Service Electronic/Cyber Fraud Task Force, and state investigations to dissect the modern threat landscape. Anchored by the public safety maxim "if it's predictable, it's preventable," Rich explains how nation-state tactics, fragmented motivations, and consumer technology are converging to put commercial organizations of all sizes directly in the crosshairs.

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.

Buck Bell, head of the Global Security Strategy Office at CDW, cuts through the typical AI marketing hype to deliver a practical framework for achieving modern cyber resilience. Armed with real-world incident metrics from 2025—including a sobering 181-day mean time to detection for standard enterprise breaches—Buck explores why preventing 100% of attacks is no longer a realistic operational goal. Instead, true resilience relies on an organization's capacity to continuously deliver intended business outcomes while actively compromised.

In this highly practical technical presentation from Deral Heiland, Veteran Penetration Tester and IoT Research Lead at Rapid 7, breaks down the core methodology required to build an enterprise-grade IoT testing program. Moving far beyond traditional Windows network testing, Deral explains why IoT must be treated strictly as an interconnected ecosystem consisting of embedded hardware, mobile/management applications, and cloud APIs.