Setting the Table - WarGames 2027 & Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs as Hybrid Warfare Nears

The opening session of the I Am The Cavalry track frames the next two and a half days of talks. Josh Corman traces the track's origins to 2013, when hacker volunteers began offering public-safety advice to government, and introduces the Undisruptible 2027 project. Its core idea is to protect a short list of lifeline functions, such as water, emergency care and power, that people cannot go without for long.

Much of the session is an interactive exercise in which the audience ranks priorities, such as patient privacy against timely treatment. The speakers argue that ransomware on hospitals can cause measurable deaths, and they use a water main failure as an example of physical consequences. They point to state-linked groups such as Volt Typhoon and note that most lifeline infrastructure is privately owned, that cyber insurance often excludes acts of war, and that federal defensive support has shrunk. Bryson Bort adds a national security view, arguing that the threat is a combination of motive, capability and access, and that engineering limits on consequences matter as much as preventing intrusion.

The practical takeaway is to plan for disruption rather than assume prevention will hold. Attendees are encouraged to learn about consequence-informed engineering, to engage local water, hospital and emergency managers, and to think about how their own households would cope if services failed.