Keynotes
Thursday Morning Keynote
Dave Kennedy
Adversaries Rising: Looking Ahead in Security
We continually see capabilities of various adversaries ranging from ransomware to nation states continue to change their tactics, techniques, and procedures to go after larger and larger companies. Our defenses largely rely on crowdsourced data, but those are largely for more mature companies that have the capabilities of understanding them and building them into their defenses. Defense is still complex, attacks continue to get more complex – how do we fix where lower-risk security breaches are only granted to a small percentage of companies with large security teams. This talk will dive into some previously known data breaches, current methods that attackers are using, and look into the future of how we need to tackle security.
Thursday Afternoon Keynote
Brian Herr
Keeping the genie in the bottle. Lessons learned from classic Sci-Fi.
Mankind has centuries of lessons learned from technology advancement gone awry. So much so that it has sparked the imagination of Sci-Fi writers to dream about what the future may hold and how mankind can possibly #$%^ things up. This talk will progress through classic Sci-Fi tropes of AI and what it means for us as we build & secure the future.
Friday Morning Keynote
Dr. Louis F. DeWeaver III
Generative AI: A Threat, Hope or just Hype.
AI, don’t believe the hype. Most people are mistaking Machine Learning (ML) for AI. Who has heard of AGI (Artificial General Intelligence). The term “AI” is highly used today but what is it actually, AGI or narrow AI? What if I told you that the AI, we see today is essentially just practical, focused ML. Ask yourself this question what exactly is AI? What qualifies a computer as being intelligent? What are the performance benchmarks that can be utilized to certify or determine what true AI is. The technology industry has not clearly defined AI. Some say AI means “computers that do something smart” (that’s way to broad). No, others are saying “it’s intelligence demonstrated by machines” (that’s broader, even if that’s possible). Would it be fair to say AI is a system that utilizes many different advanced methodologies, like ML and speech recognition, natural language processing, and other techniques that operate probabilistically (and even all combined we cannot say that’s intelligence). In this talk I will unpack the buzzword “AI” and you might discover just how over hyped the buzzword AI has become.
Friday Wrap Up Keynote
J Wolfgang Goerlich
Surviving the Robot Apocalypse 2: Dawn of the Rise of LLM
The robots are coming to kill us all. We thought we stopped them. But no. It’s time to take a long hard look at generative AI and LLMs. Sure LLMs have been living large, modeling our language. But there are things we can do defensively and offensively. Prompt social engineering. Jailbreaks. Model poisoning. There’s even evidence of malware worming their way through AI’s data lakes. In the near future, a world dominated by artificial intelligence, where machines govern every aspect of life, humanities only hope may be a talk at GrrCON and an overinflated sense of drama. This is that talk. Remember: Survival is all about the software.