Talk Title:  The Best Offense is a Good Defense: Using Controls to Survive the AI Vulnerability Surge

Abstract

Most security teams are one unverified control assumption away from a breach they never saw coming.

Frontier AI has changed attackers' speed on two fronts. It has collapsed the time between CVE disclosure and working exploit from weeks to hours, and it now lets attackers assemble what used to take months of manual chaining into minutes, stringing together the low and medium severity flaws into a direct path to the crown jewels. Most teams have never checked whether their controls actually block those techniques today, and a control that was never verified against the real attack is a blind spot.

This session maps the attacker's path through the patch window, and shows exactly where compensating controls cut the kill chain cold and where they just look like they do. Using real adversary campaigns tracked by Google Threat Intelligence and Mandiant, it shows how to pinpoint the threats actually active in your environment, find the choke point where the most paths converge, and flip the killswitch on a mitigating control that breaks multiple chains in a single move.

Mitigation first, patch second is the only response model that works at AI speed. Come find out how.

Presented by Zafran, the AI-native Threat Exposure Management platform protecting Fortune 500 organizations, with Attack Chains built in collaboration with Google Threat Intelligence.

Speaker Bio

Eric is a Strategic Solutions Engineer at Zafran Security, where he helps enterprises cut through vulnerability noise and focus remediation on what's truly exploitable. He brings more than two decades of experience in cybersecurity and IT infrastructure, with deep expertise spanning cloud security, exposure management, and sales engineering leadership.

Before joining Zafran, Eric served as Director of Solutions Architecture at Upwind Security. He spent nearly seven years at Sysdig - the creators of the CNCF Falco project - as Senior Director of Sales Engineering for North America, where he led technical teams supporting cloud-native security adoption across the region. His earlier career includes solutions engineering and presales roles at Rubrik, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and Nimble Storage, as well as IT management experience. Based in Dallas, TX, Eric is known for translating complex security concepts into practical guidance for practitioners and decision-makers alike.