Keynote

The keynote opens with the speaker's early years in security, when the field was a hacker scene around events like DEF CON, and contrasts that with today's industry of large budgets, boards and professional threat actors. It frames the daily work of defenders as making attackers' jobs harder.

The central thread is the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey. The speaker reads the HAL character not as a machine turning evil but as a system given conflicting instructions by people, and draws a parallel to security teams handed contradictory priorities. Other points cover AI as a force that accelerates everything, the view that threat actors use AI the way they have always used new tools, and the move from command-line to graphical to natural-language interfaces. Non-deterministic output is presented as a new source of error, illustrated by a near-miss in which a bad indicator of compromise would have blocked a widely used service.

The closing looks ahead to agentic AI making containment decisions at machine speed and asks who stays in the loop. The speaker argues for keeping human judgment, intuition and personal connection at the center of security work, and for preserving curiosity and the hacker spirit as the field becomes an industry.