Lisa Smith
10:00 am - 10:50 am
When working with healthcare data, security discussions often focus on protecting stored information. In this project, I took a different approach: What if I never stored the data at all? This talk explores the design of a stateless healthcare data transformation platform that converts user-provided datasets into FHIR-compliant output. Files are processed in memory, transformed, returned to the user, and discarded. I’ll discuss the security benefits, engineering tradeoffs, and architectural decisions involved, including deterministic matching, human-guided data mapping, and selective use of AI. Attendees will leave with practical ideas for reducing risk through system design.
Lisa Smith is a Senior Research Data Engineer at the University of Rochester Medical Center, where she designs and builds healthcare analytics, interoperability, and data transformation systems. Before moving into software development, she spent 15 years teaching mathematics and statistics at SUNY Geneseo. Her work focuses on healthcare data engineering, FHIR interoperability, human-guided AI systems, and building practical solutions for messy real-world data problems. Lisa is a PyCon US 2026 speaker and has authored publications and industry articles on healthcare analytics, informatics, and technology. She enjoys tackling complex problems where technology, data, and people intersect.
Aaron Beardslee
11:00 am - 11:50 am
What if we could use attacker creativity against them? Malware STR has dissected routinely enumerates its environment before detonating, checking BIOS strings, MAC OUI prefixes, RAM, running services, and process lists to detect analyst VMs. If detected, it simply exits. By adapting the userland DLL injection model of the r77 rootkit found in our OBSCURE#BAT publication, STR built Obscurize: a tool that deploys 20 Detours API hooks across every running process with no kernel driver required. Defensive mode makes physical hardware fingerprint as a VM so malware self-terminates. Trap mode inverts this, making a VM appear as genuine hardware so evasive samples detonate fully in the analyst lab.
Aaron Beardslee is a Blue Teamer at heart, but is fascinated with the Red Team aspect of cybersecurity. He has held positions from support to consulting and even law enforcement. Throughout his career at Trustwave, LogRhythm, and now Securonix, Aaron has been of the mindset that to properly defend you must understand what is attacking you. This concept drives him to keep learning about new ways to attack systems and share that knowledge with other professionals in the field. He attends Defcon, Wild West Hackin' Fest, and enjoys playing CTFs from Hack the Box, Black Hills Information Security, Try Hack Me, and various other cyber wargames. Aaron is also an avid gamer, martial artist, and drummer!
Antoine Nikolaos Valadon
1:00 pm - 1:50 pm
As the security world grows more automated and driven by agentic threat vectors, it's easy to get swept up in the hype. Agencies, industry leaders, and front-line personnel recognize the risks of an AI-centric security framework, and a wave of governance and guardrails has followed the skepticism. Yet fewer ask: what else can we try? ML is powerful, but perhaps we can harness it for high-stakes work without the unpredictability of popular generative and agentic models. This talk explores one alternative: rule-based neural networks, an interpretable model that learns a baseline of "normal" and grades how far each event deviates from it, giving an explainable severity score for review. It stays transparent, low-data, and non-generative.
Antoine Nikolaos Valadon is a Physics and Computer Science student at the University of Arizona, focused on cyber threat intelligence and the crossover between scientific computing and security. His research under the deputy PI of NASA's HelioSwarm mission applies physics-informed machine learning to reconstruct turbulent plasma fields. His security background spans SOC analysis, federal cloud incident-response training provided by DHS/CISA, and competitive CTFs. He is also a participant in an NSF-funded quantum computing CyberTraining program. Antoine is especially interested in bringing scientific problem-solving approaches to practical threat detection.
Carlo Toma & Ethan Rosenblum
2:00 pm - 2:50 pm
Join Ethan Rosenblum and Giancarlo Toma, Cybersecurity Specialists at OrbitalFire Cybersecurity, as we explore the differences between the different types of response and recovery plans, how they are tested, and how to better prepare your team to respond to any type of incident.
Giancarlo Toma is a Cybersecurity Specialist at OrbitalFire with a background spanning cybersecurity operations, technology alignment, technical leadership, and IT operations. In his current role, he works closely with smaller businesses on security monitoring, threat analysis, incident response preparedness, and security best practices. A key focus of Giancarlo's work is developing and delivering customized cybersecurity tabletop exercises that help organizations test their Incident Response, Business Continuity, and Disaster Recovery plans. By building realistic scenarios around each organization's people, technology, and processes, he helps teams identify gaps, improve communication and decision-making, and strengthen their overall incident preparedness. Giancarlo focuses on helping organizations close the gap between their written plans and their actual readiness, ensuring their teams have the knowledge and practice to respond effectively when incidents occur.
Ethan Rosenblum is a Cybersecurity Specialist at OrbitalFire, where he supports organizations with cybersecurity, risk management, and compliance initiatives. His work focuses on Third-party Risk Management, Cybersecurity Compliance Assessments, Incident Response planning and tabletop exercises, and the development of cybersecurity policies and plans. Ethan regularly works with organizations to develop and maintain Incident Response Plans and facilitates tabletop exercises designed to test those plans, identify gaps, and strengthen overall incident preparedness. He also conducts compliance assessments, evaluates third-party cybersecurity risk, and develops documentation aligned with applicable frameworks, regulatory requirements, and industry best practices. Ethan earned his Bachelor's degree in Cybersecurity from the University at Albany and is currently pursuing a Master's degree in Digital Forensics and Cybersecurity Risk and Compliance. He began his career at OrbitalFire as a Services Intern before progressing to an Associate Cybersecurity Specialist and ultimately joining the team full-time as a Cybersecurity Specialist.