You're in the Army Now

The keynote opens with the argument that technology now changes faster than people and vendors can adapt, and that many products ship with weak built-in security. The speaker, a cyber-physical security specialist, frames the talk around the militarization of cyber operations and uses the leaked Vulcan files as the main case. The material, roughly 100,000 documents and emails from a Russian state technical contractor, was analysed with journalists. It describes military-written requirements for tools covering disinformation, infrastructure disruption, telecom positioning, and operation planning, with a focus on routers, embedded firmware, and undersea cables.

The middle of the talk compares these capabilities with those of the NSA, CIA, Israel's Unit 8200, and the Stuxnet operation, arguing that Russia copied a model other states already use. It traces Russian activity in Ukraine, including the grid disruptions, NotPetya, and the Triton safety-system attack, and argues that these were military-directed rehearsals carried out by civilian contractors who made many operational mistakes. It also notes that civilians can be drawn in as subcontractors, infrastructure, or proxies, and it criticises a Ukrainian volunteer cyber army whose members were pushed into illegal activity.

The closing section argues that defenders need geopolitical and hybrid-warfare awareness, not only indicators of compromise. It points to corporate risk processes, budget cuts for training, and the absence of incident reviews and lessons learned as persistent weaknesses. It suggests governments should warn organisations about activity they see, as the NSA sometimes does, and create incentives for former military cyber staff to move into the private sector.