For years, cybersecurity strategies have been built around a fundamental question: How do we prevent the next attack? But in an environment where disruption is increasingly inevitable, the more important question may be: How well can we respond, recover, and keep moving when it happens?

In this fireside discussion, Aaron DeSpain, CISO at Lurie Children’s Hospital, joins J.D. Miller for a candid conversation about shifting the cybersecurity mindset from prevention alone to true cyber resilience. They’ll explore what it takes to prepare an organization for the moments when defenses are tested, including building operational resilience, planning for disruption, strengthening incident response, and ensuring the organization can continue delivering its most critical services.

The conversation will also examine the evolving role of the CISO, how leaders can build resilience across people, processes, and technology, and why preparing for recovery should be treated with the same urgency as preventing an attack. Attendees will leave with a practical perspective on a question every security leader should be asking: If something gets through, are we truly ready for what comes next?

Security teams are moving quickly to bring AI into the SOC, but the real test is trust. AI can help analysts move faster, reduce repetitive work, and surface useful context during investigations. But when those capabilities start shaping decisions, security leaders need more than enthusiasm. They need clear accountability, visible controls, and confidence that human judgment is still guiding the work.    

In this opening keynote, Chris Jacob will explore what practical AI governance looks like inside modern security operations. He will examine where lack of governance has led to serious failure in high-pressure environments, and what those lessons mean for CISOs building AI-enabled workflows today. The session will look at common weak points, including unclear escalation paths, inconsistent workflows, overreliance on outputs that analysts cannot easily validate, and decision processes that are difficult to audit after the fact.    

The strongest security teams will be the ones that can explain how AI is used, where it is trusted, and when people step in. This keynote gives CISOs and security leaders a practical way to think about AI governance as part of everyday operations, instead of a policy document that sits on a shelf.

AI adoption is ambient and accelerating — vibe coding, embedded copilots, and autonomous agents are entering everyday workflows faster than most security programs can realistically govern. The result is a new and largely self-inflicted risk surface: well-intentioned employees, misaligned agents, overly permissive access, and weak data controls create an "owned blast radius" where data leaks without a breach and IP is lost without an APT. At the same time, adversaries are actively probing these gaps through indirect prompt injection, system prompt leakage, and Model Context Protocol abuse. The good news: failures almost always leave signals long before they become incidents. This session walks through real-world AI attack scenarios and introduces a practical AI security blueprint — a control plane that assumes failure and enforces safety before, during, and after the model runs. You'll leave able to identify emerging risk, align controls to new AI projects, and let adoption happen securely without sacrificing speed.

News headlines show you the breaches at massive corporations, but it’s everyday organizations that face the most threats. Adversaries prey on the human psyche and use AI to advance their tactics and target the companies that keep our communities running.  For these companies, a ransomware or BEC attack isn’t just a stressful event—it’s the reason they can’t make payroll. This session explores how hackers plan to win, and why you don’t need a massive budget to fight back.  

We’ll get into how Huntress brings cyber resilience through a powerful combo of purpose-built technology and human SOC expertise to stop threats before they cause damage—because organizations of ALL sizes deserve a fighting chance against attackers.

Abstract
AI and new digital technologies will continue to shift the cybersecurity landscape in 2026. This session explores how modern tools can enhance detection, response, and decision making while introducing new risks tied to generative systems, data integrity, and fast moving threat innovation. Leaders will gain a clear view of how to adopt emerging technology in a responsible and strategic way that supports resilience and aligns with enterprise risk goals.

Key Takeaways
• How AI and emerging tech are reshaping core security functions
• The new risks created by generative models and evolving attack techniques
• Practical governance steps that support responsible AI use
• Examples of organizations pairing innovation with disciplined risk management

In just 20 minutes, discover how AI is reshaping the cyber threat landscape for municipalities—and what leaders can do now to protect essential services, citizen data, and public trust. This fast-paced presentation delivers practical insight into emerging AI-enabled attacks, the risks facing resource-constrained local governments, and the priority actions that can strengthen resilience without requiring a massive budget or technical overhaul.

80% of the applications in use by your employees on a daily basis sit unsecured by your IdP, resulting in a massive security and governance gap for your company. This bucket of applications has no access or authentication control, no auditability and no automated onboarding/offboarding leading to epic breaches with losses from 100M to 2.9BN at companies like MGM, UHG, Cisco, McDonalds, Transunion and more. This session will introduce a revolutionary new approach to discovering, managing and eliminating these liabilities via a new algorithm called Key Derived Authentication (KDA) which would have prevented all the aforementioned breaches.  

Attendees will gain an understanding of how, via the Unixi Security Platform, KDA controls identities and access in these unprotected apps, turning them into secured, auditable apps where users no longer have control, knowledge or management of passwords, making phishing and social engineering attacks impossible.

Adopting a risk-based mindset significantly enhances cyber resilience by enabling organizations to prioritize   resources on protecting high-value assets, mitigate threats more effectively, and adapt dynamically to an evolving landscape. This strategic approach shifts focus from prevention to containment of breach, ensuring a more agile, efficient, and robust cybersecurity posture capable of minimizing the impact of cyberattacks.

An agent doesn't wait for your scan window, and an ungoverned agent identity is really an ungoverned path to sensitive data. Finding it is the easier half. EJ Pappas, Field CTO at PKWARE, covers why classification is what lets you match remediation to the business need instead of applying one blunt fix to everything, and how that simplifies your audit as you already have the evidence.  

What attendees will learn  

• Why identity governance and data governance are the same problem wearing two badges
• Why one remediation tactic applied to everything either breaks the business or leaves data exposed
• What an audit trail must contain to work as evidence instead of an explanation

Cybersecurity spends enormous energy building resilience into our systems, our infrastructure, and our organizations. But we rarely talk about the resilience of the people responsible for protecting them, except after that resilience has already failed. In this talk, we’ll explore how professional communities and “third places” create the social infrastructure that helps security professionals learn, adapt, recover, and thrive. We’ll look at what leaders can do to help their people build stronger professional support networks, why those connections matter to both individual and organizational resilience, and how making space for community can strengthen the people our security programs depend on. Because resilient security programs require resilient people, and resilient people rarely get there alone.

Cybersecurity is evolving at a pace few could have predicted. Over the past year alone, AI has accelerated innovation, identity has become the new security perimeter, threat actors have grown more sophisticated, and security leaders have been forced to rethink long held assumptions about risk, resilience, and defense.

Join Jeff Steadman, co-host of the acclaimed Identity at the Center podcast, for a candid fireside conversation with J.D. Miller, SVP of Communities Event Programming at CyberRisk Alliance and host of more than 650 podcast episodes. Together, they will reflect on the biggest changes shaping cybersecurity today, the lessons learned from conversations with hundreds of industry leaders, and the trends that will define the next chapter of the profession.

From identity security and AI to leadership, emerging threats, and the future of the security community, this discussion offers a unique perspective from two experienced interviewers who have spent years capturing the ideas and insights driving the industry forward. Attendees will leave with a broader understanding of where cybersecurity is headed and the questions every security leader should be asking next.

Employee credentials are the leading driver of enterprise risk — 74% of CISOs name human risk their top concern, and credential theft surged 160% in 2025 alone. Yet the browser, where every credential is actually used, is a blind spot for security teams, even with traditional password management in place. Join Kevin Bardos, Vice President of Product Management at Dashlane, for a discussion on this gap and why securing employee credentials at the point of use requires browser-native visibility and protection.

Once upon a time Shrek taught us that onions, ogres, and parfaits have layers and so must your cyber resilience strategy — because ransomware operators no longer stop at production data.

This session walks the concentric layers of a defensible data protection posture: monitoring and active defense of production data at the core, then a well-architected protection strategy, encrypted offsite immutable backups, encrypted replicas of business-critical VMs, and the layer most organizations skip — validated, tested recovery of those replicas and backups. We'll look at what an attacker must defeat to reach each successive layer, and where real-world recovery efforts most often break down. We'll also show how 11:11 Systems partners across the full portfolio — Managed Backup, Cloud Object Storage, DRaaS, and Managed Security — so each layer is not just architected but continuously operated and proven.