I am the Cavalry

Josh Corman opens the I am the Cavalry track at BSides Las Vegas, marking the initiative's thirteenth year. He frames the core problem as society's growing reliance on connected software in public-safety systems such as water, power, medical devices and hospitals, and argues that this dependence has outpaced our ability to secure it. He describes how the group's Undisruptible 27 effort has shifted toward target-rich but cyber-poor operators, aiming to fund practical engineering mitigations for water utilities that serve hospitals.

He then walks through the threat picture. He cites recent activity against programmable logic controllers in water utilities, the Volt Typhoon prepositioning in US infrastructure, and a possible Taiwan contingency timeline. He argues that availability matters more than confidentiality in operational technology, and that denial of service can cause real harm without any remote code execution. He also critiques the assumption that AI-driven vulnerability discovery is addressed by patch creation alone, since many operators cannot patch quickly or at all.

The talk closes by previewing the rest of the track, which covers engineering-based defenses, hospital continuity, communications, food supply and emergency management. The speaker asks attendees to engage with their local municipal leaders and to bring concrete, actionable ideas back to their communities rather than treating the problem as a spectator sport.