SEC595: Applied Data Science and AI/Machine Learning for Cybersecurity Professionals

In a fast-evolving threat landscape, multi-year cybersecurity roadmaps age quickly. This keynote shows how a lean strategy—continuous learning, rapid iteration, and measurable value—keeps organizations ahead of adversaries and business change.
Drawing on Harvard Business Review and Harvard Kennedy School research on agile leadership and adaptive strategy, we’ll cover how high performers achieve up to 30% faster decision-making, 40% greater operational resilience, and 20% higher ROI by prioritizing flexibility over rigidity.
We’ll translate these principles into practice for cybersecurity teams to modernize governance, streamline investments, and deliver outcomes aligned with both security and business agility.
Cybersecurity risk isn’t a side dish—it belongs at the head table of enterprise risk management. In this session, Ian Frist, Director of Governance, Risk and Compliance at Corning, explores how organizations can stop treating cyber risk as a siloed technical concern and start integrating it into their broader risk appetite framework.
Infrastructure Susceptibility Analysis (ISA) is MITRE-developed methodology to help organizations understand how disruptions (whether cyber, physical, or operational) could affect the systems they depend on most. ISA combines elements of risk analysis, system modeling, and threat intelligence to illuminate the often-hidden dependencies between digital and physical infrastructure. This approach enables leaders to identify where adversaries could cause the most harm, quantify the potential business and operational consequences, and prioritize the most effective resilience investments.
Remember when ChatGPT was going to revolutionize your security program overnight? Two years into production deployments, it's time for an honest conversation about what actually happened when LLMs met the reality of 24/7 security operations, application security and cyber threat intelligence.
As security incidents grow faster, louder, and more complex, endurance alone is no longer a strategy—resilience is. Today’s leaders must create environments where teams can perform under constant pressure without sacrificing well-being or long-term effectiveness.
The latest estimates from the Non-Human Identity Working group put the ratio of non-human identities to humans at 80:1. With increased pressure on CISOs to protect not only human threats, but now an exponentially increasing number of non-human threats, how can the CISO role, and the role of the evolving Chief Identity Officer (CiDO), increase security posture while moving at the speed of innovation and increased usage?
The reason organizations choose a particular CISO is fundamentally because they trust the CISO's judgement. A CISO draws from their experience, which includes domain, industry, managerial and leadership background, etc. which provides them with the intuition to manage an organization's cybersecurity program effectively. People refer to this intuition as an art, and it usually works. Unfortunately, when it fails, it can create a massive failure. Similarly, a large part of the success of a program depends upon the CISOs ability to sell the program to executives and the board of directors. This ability to sell is likewise considered an art.