Cybersecurity leadership is about far more than technology. It is about people, judgment, resilience, communication, and the ability to make good decisions when the answers are not always clear.

In this fireside discussion, J.D. Miller sits down with Quincey Collins, Chief Security Officer at Sheppard Mullin, to explore the leadership lessons he has gathered throughout a career spanning more than two decades across the U.S. Air Force, NATO, the Department of Defense, and the private sector. Quincey will share how those experiences shaped his approach to building teams, earning trust, managing risk, communicating with executives, and leading through change.

The conversation will also explore the importance of mentorship and community, why curiosity and continuous learning remain critical at every stage of a cybersecurity career, and how leaders can develop the next generation of talent. With AI and automation continuing to reshape security operations, J.D. and Quincey will discuss why strong leadership fundamentals, sound judgment, and the ability to connect cybersecurity to the needs of the business may matter more than ever.

Attendees will walk away with practical lessons on becoming a stronger, more adaptable cybersecurity leader, and on building teams and relationships that can withstand whatever comes next.

Rubrik delivers an immutable, air-gapped, and physically isolated "Bunker in a Box" solution for end to end cyber resiliency and recovery. Through Rubrik Identity Recovery, the platform provides automated, full-forest recovery and cross-tenant workflows across hybrid on-premises Active Directory and Microsoft Entra & Okta environments. Rather than forcing a costly net-new rebuild or suffering point-in-time data loss, Rubrik leverages an intelligent roll forward capability that offers IAM Teams a third option, allowing administrators to surgically remove attacker persistence and restore a clean, validated identity layer with minimal business downtime.

Cyberattacks are accelerating beyond the limits of manual, point-in-time defense. As AI lowers the barrier to entry for attackers, adversaries can discover, chain, and exploit weaknesses at machine speed, while security teams remain buried in vulnerability noise, compliance checklists, and disconnected findings.  

This session reframes offensive security around the paths that actually lead to business impact. It explores how organizations can use AI strategically—not as an unpredictable black box, but as a controlled, production-safe capability that combines graph reasoning, machine learning, and scoped generative AI. Attendees will learn how to move from theoretical risk to proven exploitability through a continuous Hack, Fix, Verify, Repeat cycle, prioritizing the weaknesses that create the greatest exposure and validating that remediation truly worked.

Artificial intelligence is accelerating how organizations operate—but it is also amplifying risk. As AI adoption expands, the speed, scale, and potential blast radius of data-related incidents are increasing at an unprecedented rate.    

This presentation explores how security leaders can evolve from traditional backup and recovery strategies to modern data resilience frameworks designed for the AI era. Attendees will learn how to ensure data integrity, maintain control over rapidly expanding identities—including AI agents—and recover with precision when incidents occur.    

Veeam will introduce a practical approach to achieving Data and AI Trust, enabling organizations to confidently embrace AI innovation while maintaining security, compliance, and operational continuity.

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

The FBI announced Operation Winter SHIELD in February 2026 as a national cybersecurity awareness and resilience campaign. Operation Winter SHIELD centered on ten actions "that organizations can take to improve resilience against cyber intrusions." In this session, we will briefly review each those ten items, discuss their importance, and suggest a handful of additional controls that extend the concepts suggested by Operation Winter SHIELD.

Ransomware attacks have become more sophisticated than ever. 66% of organizations have experienced at least one attack in the past two years, and 96% of those target backup data. So, when—not if—a breach happens, and your business, reputation, and career are on the line, immutable backup storage is your best and last line of defense.  However, if ‘immutable’ data can be overwritten by a backup or storage admin, a vendor, or an attacker, then it cannot be considered a storage solution with Absolute Immutability. In this presentation, learn how to make your backup data ransomware-proof with Absolute Immutability.

The operational technology threat landscape looks very different than it did just a few years ago. Greater connectivity, IT and OT convergence, remote access, third-party dependencies, aging infrastructure, and increasingly capable adversaries have expanded both the attack surface and the potential consequences of a cyber incident. In OT, those consequences can extend far beyond data and systems to impact operations, production, safety, and the physical world.

In this fireside discussion, Matt Crouse, CISO of Solar Turbines, joins J.D. Miller for a thought-provoking conversation about how the OT threat landscape has evolved and what cybersecurity leaders need to understand about where it is heading next.

Drawing on Matt’s experience across cybersecurity and operational environments, the conversation will explore how threats to OT have changed, where organizations continue to have blind spots, and why traditional approaches to cybersecurity do not always translate neatly into industrial environments. They’ll discuss IT/OT convergence, legacy technology, visibility and asset management, third-party access, segmentation, incident response, and the growing challenge of defending increasingly connected physical operations.

Most importantly, the discussion will look beyond any one industry or organization to examine the bigger picture: How should security leaders be thinking differently about OT risk today, and what will it take to build resilient operations for the threats of tomorrow?

Coding agents now write, review, build, test and deploy software, often with no human watching each step. At the same time, AI-generated code is failing security tests at high rates, and attackers armed with frontier models are exploiting vulnerabilities on or before disclosure day. Tools built for human developers working at human speed can't keep up.  In this seven-minute session, Legit co-founder and CTO Liav Caspi lays out a two-part approach for AppSec in the agentic era. Secure generation keeps coding agents from introducing vulnerabilities and blocks risky agent actions as they happen. Autonomous remediation finds, prioritizes and fixes the exploitable risk already in your code on every change. Both run on a shared security context that gets smarter with every commit and every fix, so defense can finally move as fast as the agents writing the code.

Abstract:
As organizations expand their digital ecosystems, risks extend far beyond internal networks. Threat actors are increasingly exploiting supply chains, third-party vendors, and identity gaps to gain access. This session brings together cybersecurity leaders and solution providers to explore how these interwoven risks create a complex attack surface -and how technology can help mitigate them.

Panelists will share real-world examples, lessons from managing large vendor networks, and innovative tools and frameworks for continuous risk assessment. Discussions will highlight strategies for mapping hidden dependencies, enforcing strong identity governance, and strengthening resilience through automation, collaboration, and transparency. Attendees will gain actionable insights on reducing exposure, improving third-party risk visibility, and leveraging technology to secure their extended digital ecosystem.

Key Takeaways:
• Understand how supply chains, vendors, and identities amplify organizational risk.
• Explore practical methods and tools for assessing, monitoring, and mitigating third-party and ecosystem vulnerabilities.
• Learn how to treat identity as a security perimeter using zero trust, access governance, and automated solutions.
• Gain insights from real-world breaches that reveal common gaps in vendor and identity controls.
• Walk away with a technology-informed framework to enhance resilience, secure partnerships, and reduce exposure across your digital ecosystem.

As AI systems move from generating recommendations to executing actions, cybersecurity leaders face a central question: what authority should machines receive, and where must human judgment govern? This fireside discussion examines how to translate human oversight into practical safeguards for agentic AI, including bounded permissions, approval thresholds, continuous monitoring, and the ability to interrupt or reverse consequential actions. It also explores how trust, automation bias, and organizational culture influence oversight—and why assigning a human reviewer alone is insufficient. Attendees will gain a practical perspective on defining decision rights, preserving accountability, and designing escalation paths that support innovation while protecting sensitive data, critical operations, and public trust.

Torq surveyed 450 SOC leaders globally to find out what AI is actually doing inside the SOC. The findings challenged some assumptions — and confirmed others.  We’ll dig into insights including:   Why 97% of security leaders are confident AI can handle triage, but only 35% are using it there  What’s behind the trust barrier that 92% of leaders say is holding AI back  What 85% of leaders mean when they say they want a “unified platform”  Where teams plan to expand AI over the next 12 months — and what’s standing in their way

AI is rapidly becoming one of the most powerful tools available to cybersecurity teams, but what happens when the technology you are relying on to defend your organization becomes part of the risk?

As breaches, vulnerabilities, and security concerns surrounding frontier AI models continue to emerge, cyber leaders may need to rethink what it means to build a trusted AI-powered defense. For some organizations, simply plugging into a commercial model may not provide the control, transparency, or resilience required for critical security operations.

In this session, Nelson Saenz, VP of IT at Pomona Farming, will explore the case for taking greater ownership of the AI stack, from infrastructure and data to the models themselves. He’ll examine the growing role of open-weight models, including the increasingly capable models coming out of China, and the opportunities and risks organizations face when building AI capabilities they can operate and control themselves.

Attendees will walk away with a practical look at an emerging question for cybersecurity leaders: If AI is going to become a core part of your cyber defense, how much of that technology do you actually need to own?

Abstract:
Cybersecurity challenges are complex, and solving them requires teams with diverse perspectives, skills, and experiences. This panel explores how diversity drives better problem-solving, innovation, and threat detection in security organizations.

Panelists will share strategies for attracting and retaining talent from varied backgrounds, leveraging unique thinking styles, and applying different experiences to uncover blind spots in risk management. Attendees will gain actionable insights for building teams that are not only technically skilled but more adaptive, creative, and resilient in the face of evolving cyber threats.

Key Takeaways:

• Understand how diversity strengthens problem-solving, innovation, and threat response.
• Learn approaches to recruit and retain talent from non-traditional backgrounds.
• Explore how different perspectives and thinking styles reveal hidden risks.
• Gain strategies to create teams that are adaptable, collaborative, and resilient.
• Walk away with practical ideas for integrating diversity into cybersecurity team design and strategy.

AI agents have adopted a range of security tasks. Across SOCs a question is being asked: how do we design autonomy acceptable to our security engineering principles? Or more simply, when should we be in vs on the loop with agents?  

This talk proposes a framework to approach this challenge. A method that takes into mind design and dynamism of impact criticality and context. When an attack spreads toward critical systems, the blast radius grows, and the human moves closer to the action. As the AI earns trust, the human can move up the loop to focus on validation and tuning.

Organizations are deploying guardrails and AI firewalls to protect their growing use of AI. These controls play an important role, but they cannot reveal how an attacker might probe an AI system, exploit unexpected behavior or chain weaknesses across models, agents and connected tools.  In this session, attendees will learn why securing AI requires adopting the attacker’s perspective. We will examine how offensive techniques such as reconnaissance, adversarial testing and multi-step attack simulation can expose gaps that defensive controls alone may miss. Attendees will leave with one clear principle for building more resilient AI systems: the strongest AI defense starts with offense.