Chris Cochran

This talk explores the hidden security challenges of living and working alongside AI, aimed at everyone who uses these tools. It breaks down how AI changes the cyber threat landscape, how personal data can be exposed through everyday AI tools, and provides a practical framework for staying safe. The session emphasizes that technical knowledge isn't required to understand risks or protect oneself, but rather the right mindset, smart habits, and understanding of how the technology works.

We are living in the calm before the storm. Autonomous AI attacks are emerging, faster, more adaptive, and capable of acting across entire supply chains before a human can intervene. This threat is faster, more incessant, and does not tire. The only path forward is readiness. This talk covers how defenders prepare for an era of agentic, self-directed AI systems: 1. Education at Scale: Cybersecurity practitioners must rapidly upskill in AI fundamentals. Understanding agent behavior, emergent failure modes, and multistage AI attack chains is now essential. Training defenders is the fastest way to build national and organizational resilience. 2. Strengthening the Fundamentals: In an autonomous threat environment, fundamentals determine survivability. Identity, segmentation, detection engineering, tabletop discipline, and IR rigor become amplified, strong foundations become multipliers, weak ones become liabilities. 3. Using AI to Defend: Fight fire with fire. We’ll explore how to leverage AI for accelerated detection, automated response, virtual tabletops, vulnerability analysis, and the creation of systemic safety infrastructure. 4. Why cybersecurity is now central to AI safety: As AI systems gain capabilities once exclusive to human adversaries, safeguarding autonomy, integrity, provenance, and monitoring becomes cybersecurity’s domain.

This talk is specifically for Cybersecurity Awareness Month. In this talk, I tailor it towards the organization that I'm speaking to. It could be a general conversation around the threats and risks that we are seeing on the front lines of cybersecurity. It could be a conversation about artificial intelligence and how to stay safe, or frameworks on how to stay safe while at work and at home.