Black Hat 2026 Preview: AI, Cybersecurity’s Evolution, and People Behind the Industry – BH26 #1
Black Hat 2026 kicks off with our hosts Mike Shema and Jackie McGuire discussing what’s ahead at this year’s event. From the rapid evolution of AI and agentic technologies to the changing cybersecurity workforce, they explore the trends, conversations, and challenges shaping the industry. The pair discuss the return of the Black Hat community, the next generation of security professionals, startup innovation, and how practitioners are adapting to a rapidly changing technology landscape.
InfoSec World brings cybersecurity professionals together across industries, from healthcare and financial services to government and the Fortune 500. Join the community in Orlando, October 12–14, for practical education, new perspectives, and cybersecurity research unveiled live. Listeners save 30% on their pass with code ISW26-SWSAVINGS at securityweekly.com/infosecworld2026.
The Perfect Storm: When AI Writes the Code and Sharpens the Attacks – Idan Plotnik – BH26 #1
Two storms are converging on how software gets built. The first: AI coding assistants are generating far more code than any security team can review, and with it, far more risk. The second: AI is sharpening the tools attackers use to find and exploit weaknesses faster than ever. Idan Plotnik, co-founder and CEO of Apiiro, explains why this convergence has moved the security perimeter to the coding agent itself, and makes the case for a prevention-first model where an AI AppSec agent guards coding agents in real time, governed by the principle that the agent writing the code cannot be the one to secure it.
This segment is sponsored by Apiiro. Visit https://securityweekly.com/apiirobh to learn more about them!
Idan is a serial entrepreneur and product strategist, bringing to Apiiro nearly 20 years of experience in cybersecurity. Previously, Idan was Director of Engineering at Microsoft following the acquisition of Aorato where he served as the founder and CEO.
How AI Is Reshaping What’s Possible for Leaders of The Security Program – Greg Baker – BH26 #1
Cybersecurity leaders are still making high-stakes decisions with fragmented data, static assessments, and market guidance that is often slow, expensive, or commercially biased. Greg Baker will explore how AI can create a continuously updated understanding of both the enterprise security program and the market around it—giving CISOs the context to model scenarios, prioritize investments, and move from insight to action with greater speed and confidence.
For more information about Balance Theory, please visit: https://securityweekly.com/balancetheorybh
Greg Baker is a cybersecurity entrepreneur and the Co-Founder and CEO of Balance Theory. He spent the first decade of his career supporting the U.S. intelligence community before founding Decision Lab, a cybersecurity company acquired by Optiv. Following the acquisition, Greg held senior leadership roles at Optiv, helping some of the world’s largest enterprises navigate cybersecurity strategy, transformation, and technology investment.
He is now building Balance Theory to fundamentally change how security leaders understand their programs, navigate the market, and take action.
Why Agentic AI Security Requires a Defense-In-Depth Strategy – Kaushik Shanadi – BH26 #1
Many organizations are approaching agentic AI security by stitching together individual controls, assuming that identity, network, endpoint, or application security alone is enough. Each address only one part of the problem. As AI agents become more autonomous, move across systems, and take actions on behalf of users, organizations need a true defense-in-depth strategy that combines every layer of the security stack. Kaushik can discuss how each security layer provides a different piece of the puzzle and how individually, none of the controls are sufficient. But together, they create the layered governance needed to securely deploy agentic AI.
For more information about Helmet Security, please visit https://securityweekly.com/helmetbh.
Kaushik Shanadi is Co-Founder and CTO of Helmet Security, where he is building scalable, agent-native security protocols for the next generation of AI systems. A security engineer with deep experience across startups and enterprise environments, he has spent his career designing secure, high-performance infrastructure and solving complex cybersecurity challenges. Prior to founding Helmet, Kaushik served as Chief Architect at Conceal, where he led the development of advanced security technologies. He is based in the Washington, D.C. area and holds a B.S. degree from the University of Florida.
The Shift to Machine-Led Security: What’s Next for Cyber Defense – Galina Antova – BH26 #1
Artificial intelligence is fundamentally changing cybersecurity- not only by making attacks faster and more sophisticated, but also by forcing defenders to rethink how security operations are built. In this conversation, Kai CEO and co-founder Galina Antova discusses why the industry is moving toward machine-led security, what is preventing organizations from trusting autonomous AI, and what recent survey data from hundreds of CISOs reveals about where cybersecurity is headed next.
To learn more about Kai, please visit: https://securityweekly.com/kaibh
Galina Antova is a serial cybersecurity entrepreneur and the CEO and co-founder of Kai, an agentic AI company built to replace fragmented security tools with autonomous, end-to-end defense. Previously, she co-founded Claroty, a multi-billion dollar pre-IPO cyber-physical security company. Prior to that, she led Industrial Security Services at Siemens and was a technical leader at IBM’s Software Group. Galina holds a B.Sc. in Computer Science from York University and an MBA from IMD, Switzerland.
Outpacing the Adversary with AI Threat Defense – John Hultquist – BH26 #1
The cybersecurity landscape is undergoing a radical shift. AI is no longer just a productivity accelerator for developers and analysts—it has become actively weaponized by sophisticated threat actors to discover and exploit vulnerabilities at unprecedented speed. We'll discuss Google’s own approach to combating today’s threats and the need for security teams to transform vulnerability management with machine-speed defense.
Segment Resources:
https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/identity-security/introducing-google-ai-threat-defense https://cloud.google.com/security/ai-threat-defense https://services.google.com/fh/files/misc/ebookgooglecloudsecurityaithreatdefense.pdf https://services.google.com/fh/files/misc/whitepapercombatingaidriventhreatsgooglemachinespeed_defense.pdf
This segment is sponsored by Google Cloud. Visit https://securityweekly.com/googlebh to learn more about them!
John Hultquist is Chief Analyst at Google Threat Intelligence Group, having come to Google through its acquisition of Mandiant. John has over 25 years of experience in intelligence and special operations, principally covering emerging threats in cyber espionage. His team found and first publicly exposed the Russian threat actor best known as Sandworm. John is the founder of CYBERWARCON and SLEUTHCON, and he teaches at Johns Hopkins University. He is also a veteran of the US Army.
Optiv: The One Partner to Advise, Deploy and Operate. That’s Cybersecurity Simplified – John Hurley – BH26 #1
This segment will focus on Optiv's unmatched ability to advise, deploy and operate complete cybersecurity programs. With more than 6,000 clients and 450 technology partners, Optiv is the one clients trust to handle real-world cyber complexity, reduce risk and deliver real results.
Learn why Optiv is the most trusted brand in cyber at https://securityweekly.com/optivbh.
John Hurley has more than 25 years of experience in the technology industry driving success for global, commercial and enterprise organizations. As chief revenue officer (CRO) for Optiv, he is responsible for the company’s revenue-generation strategy and go-to-market approach to drive sustainable growth.
Hurley joined Optiv from Quantum, where he served as CRO and had oversight for a global sales organization and all routes to market. He also led Quantum’s transition from a traditional hardware business to software only, subscription and SaaS offerings. Previously, Hurley spent the majority of his career in various leadership roles at Cisco and Dell spanning sales, go-to-market strategies and growth marketing.
Hurley is active in the community and committed to helping foster the next generation of leadership. He serves and has served as a board member or executive sponsor for a number of philanthropic organizations including the University of Michigan Mott Classic, American Hospital Association Dallas, Cystic Fibrosis of Michigan and Van Andel Institute and Connected Women’s Group of Midwest Technology Leaders.
The Agent Is the New Insider: Why Human Risk Doesn’t Stop at People – Leslie Nielsen – BH26 #1
AI agents now act with the same credentials and access as the humans who deployed them, but without the judgment or accountability that comes with actual employment. Mimecast CISO Leslie Nielsen argues that treating agentic AI as a brand new, standalone security category is the wrong instinct: agents are an extension of human risk, and the controls organizations already use to manage people are the right foundation for managing machines. In this conversation, Nielsen unpacks the growing gap between security leaders who expect AI driven attacks and those who feel prepared for them, and what that gap means for CISOs walking the floor at Black Hat.
Segment Resources:
Mimecast's new whitepaper Securing The Agentic Enterprise: https://assets.mimecast.com/api/public/content/securing-the-agentic-enterprise?v=ea66db05 Mimecast's landing page for thought leadership resources: https://www.workprotected.com/ Mimecast's State of Human Risk Report: https://www.mimecast.com/resources/ebooks/state-of-human-risk/ Mimecast's Threat Intelligence Hub: https://www.mimecast.com/threat-intelligence-hub/
For more information about Mimecast please visit: https://securityweekly.com/mimecastbh
Leslie leads Mimecast’s global cybersecurity strategy as CISO, including threat intelligence, risk management, and detection and response, while ensuring regulatory compliance to protect Mimecast’s more than 42,000 global customers. With over 25 years of cybersecurity experience, he is known for driving innovative security strategies and building resilient, high-performing teams. He joined Mimecast from Klaviyo, where he served as SVP and CISO and helped scale the company to $1.3 billion in revenue, strengthen its security posture, and lead its security function through IPO. Before that, he was SVP and CISO at Nuance Communications, joining after a major malware attack to lead an accelerated security transformation that helped position the company as one of Microsoft’s largest acquisitions.
Earlier in his career, Leslie held senior security leadership roles at SAP Concur and SuccessFactors as VP and CISO, served as CTO at SOS Security, and held senior positions at IBM and ACS (acquired by Xerox); he has also served on Google’s CISO Cloud Advisory Board. Leslie holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from Texas Tech University.
How Menlo Security Is Securing AI Agents from Prompt Injection – Ramin Farassat – BH26 #1
Enterprises are deploying AI agents like Microsoft Copilot, Google Gemini, and Claude Code faster than they can secure them, and attackers are exploiting that gap through prompt injection. Hidden instructions get buried in web pages, files, and even images that a human would never notice but an AI agent reads and acts on. Menlo Security is building Menlo Agent Runtime Security (MARS) to close that gap, running every agent session in an isolated cloud that sanitizes content before an agent can act on it. Ramin Farassat, Menlo Security's Chief Product Officer, will discuss why the exposure lives in the connectors and integrations around the model rather than the model itself, and how security teams can put controls on the agent attack surface without blocking agentic AI outright.
Segment Resources:
https://www.menlosecurity.com/product/ai-agent-security
MARS is now available today, and Menlo Security is demonstrating it live at Black Hat USA (Booth #4702, Mandalay Bay) and Ai4 (Booth #424, The Venetian), August 4–6 in Las Vegas. Please visit: https://securityweekly.com/menlobh
Executive Product Leader with a proven track record of scaling SaaS platforms, driving AI-led innovation, and delivering sustained enterprise growth. I bridge boardroom strategy with day-to-day execution, aligning product direction with market opportunity, investor priorities, and operational excellence.
Model, harness, gym: why Novee owns the full AI pentesting stack – Ido Geffen – BH26 #1
Most "AI security" tools are thin wrappers around a general-purpose frontier LLM — reasoning capability rented from someone else, applied to a generic scanning workflow. Novee took the opposite path. In this interview, Novee CEO and co-founder Ido Geffen breaks down what it means to own the full AI pentesting stack — the proprietary offensive reasoning model, the harness that coordinates specialized agents, and the training gym where those agents are continuously benchmarked, post-trained on real attacker tradecraft, and promoted into production.
Ido explains why owning each layer matters: it's how Novee's model consistently outperforms frontier LLMs at live browser exploitation, how the platform improves at a rate the customer feels every cycle, how Novee keeps security testing cost-efficient rather than relying on tokenized pricing models, and how new attacker techniques get injected into agent memory the moment Novee's research team observes them in the wild. He then makes the case that owning the model is only half the story. The other half is the Asset Intelligence Model — a living understanding of each customer's environment, workflows, permissions, APIs, and business logic. That's what turns a generalist AI hacker into a bespoke one: not just an attacker that reasons well, but one that reasons well about your specific business. Ido closes with what this compound advantage means for buyers: findings that get more targeted every cycle, remediation tailored to their actual stack, and a platform whose ceiling rises as attackers get faster.
This segment is sponsored by Novee Security. Visit https://securityweekly.com/noveebh to learn more about them!
Ido Geffen is the CEO and co-founder of Novee, the leader in AI-powered penetration testing. He brings over 20 years of experience across offensive and defensive cybersecurity, including nation-scale operations, vulnerability exploitation, and defense.
Through his work on national defense, he and fellow Novee co-founders Gon Chalamish and Omer Ninburg saw enterprises facing an impossible challenge: deploying code continuously while testing security only quarterly, even as attackers operate 24/7 with AI-powered tools. They founded Novee in May 2025 to clone their combined expertise into an agent that runs continuously, finding zero-days, business logic flaws, and complex attack chains that traditional tools miss.
AI Pentesting and the Future of Cybersecurity – Chris Wallis – BH26 #1
This segment discusses how AI addresses the long-standing gap between traditional pentesting and automated vulnerability scanning. Intruder CEO and founder Chris Wallis dives into the nuances of AI-enabled security and how these offerings will impact midmarket security teams.
Segment Resources:
https://www.intruder.io/platform/ai-pentesting
https://www.intruder.io/blog/ai-pentesting-the-depth-of-a-pentest-on-demand
https://www.intruder.io/blog/ai-web-app-pentesting-test-on-every-major-release
Intruder's continuous exposure management platform helps security, IT, and engineering teams stop breaches before they start. For more information about Intruder’s products and services, please visit https://securityweekly.com/intruderbh.
Chris Wallis is the founder and CEO of Intruder. With deep experience in both offensive security and defensive operations, Chris has worked hands-on with global banks, major financial institutions, and critical national infrastructure, securing some of the most targeted and high-risk environments in the world. This blend of attacker-led insight and real-world defense crafted Intruder’s practical approach to finding and fixing the vulnerabilities that matter before they can be exploited.
Delinea Delivers Runtime Authorization for AI Agents, Closing Access Control Gap – Frank Vukovits – BH26 #1
As AI agents move from experiments to autonomous operators inside production databases, cloud consoles, and Kubernetes clusters, enterprises face a new problem: agents with legitimate credentials taking actions no one authorized. Frank Vukovits, Chief Security Scientist at Delinea, breaks down why verifying access at connection time is no longer enough and what it takes to enforce policy on every agent action before it executes. He explains how runtime authorization closes the gap between hiding credentials and actually controlling what agents do once they're inside a session.
This segment is sponsored by Delinea. Visit https://securityweekly.com/delineabh to learn more about them!
Frank Vukovits is Chief Security Scientist at Delinea and a 30-year experienced auditor, security, and business software professional. As a user, Frank has implemented and managed numerous ERP projects and now combines his software, security, and audit knowledge in his role at Delinea and is a frequent speaker at user groups and audit events. Frank has held corporate IT audit roles, and he carries Certified Internal Auditor and Certified Information Systems Auditor designations. Previously he was also a CISSP. He has presented educational sessions publicly for the past two decades and has been on all sides of auditing, as a user, an auditor, and a vendor of audit and security software in his role currently at Delinea.
The Business Case for Cybersecurity Workforce Resilience – Lynn Dohm – BH26 #1
The joint report from WiCyS and FourOne Insights reveals that mentorship, skills-based promotion, and third-party partnerships don’t just improve workforce outcomes — they deliver measurable ROI, including more than $125,000 in savings per employee.
As cybersecurity leaders grapple with persistent talent shortages, AI-driven skill shifts, and demographic headwinds, the report positions workforce resilience as a measurable business advantage — not just an HR initiative.
Segment Resources:
https://www.wicys.org/resources/the-roi-of-resilience/ https://www.wicys.org/initiatives/the-wicys-cyber-talent-study/
This segment is sponsored by Women in CyberSecurity (WiCyS). Visit https://securityweekly.com/wicysbh to learn more about them!
Lynn Dohm, Executive Director of Women in CyberSecurity (WiCyS), leads initiatives to recruit, retain and advance women in cybersecurity. With over two decades of experience as a strategist, she has successfully aligned businesses, nonprofits and grant-funded programs with workforce goals. Her accolades include an honorary Doctor of Science & Technology from Champlain College (2024), two SANS Difference Maker Awards and recognition as one of CS Hub’s Top 25 Cybersecurity Leaders. Lynn also contributes to the cybersecurity community through her roles on the CSA AI Initiative, the UMGC CIT Advisory Board, and as a Board Member for the CIS Alan Paller Laureate Program.
The Hidden Risks of the AI Supply Chain – Michael Leland – BH26 #1
AI agents can independently discover and install new tools, but the emerging ecosystem of AI Skills and MCP servers lacks many of the trust and security controls applied to traditional software. Michael Leland will discuss Island research uncovering thousands of malicious repositories, widespread security flaws across MCP servers, and a new attack technique called “AgentBaiting,” in which attackers manipulate agents into finding and recommending malware to users. The conversation will explore how enterprises can govern AI capabilities without slowing adoption.
Segment Resources:
https://www.island.io/blog/agentbaiting-how-800-fake-ai-skills-and-mcp-servers-delivered-malware
For more information about Island's research, please visit: https://securityweekly.com/islandbh
Michael Leland brings over 30 years of data networking, operations, and cybersecurity domain expertise. He formerly served as Head of Technical Marketing and Chief Cybersecurity Evangelist at SentinelOne where he was responsible for messaging and strategic development of their XDR product roadmap as well as the identity security portfolio. Prior to SentinelOne, he held the title of Chief Technical Strategist for McAfee. Michael was the co-founder and CTO of NitroSecurity – later acquired by McAfee – where he was responsible for developing and implementing their overall SIEM technology vision and roadmap and has held senior technical management positions at Cabletron and Avaya.
