Name: Defending Against AI-Driven Identity Threats in 2026
Start: 2026-02-11T23:00:00Z
End: 2026-02-11T23:01:00.000Z
Location: BrightTALK

This channel features presentations by leading experts in the field of information security. From application, computer, network and Internet security to access control management, data privacy and other hot topics, you will walk away with practical advice for your strategic and tactical information security initiatives.

Identity governance and administration (IGA) programs are critical for managing enterprise security and compliance, yet many organizations face persistent challenges. Operational inefficiencies, reliance on manual processes, and the growing complexity of managing diverse applications and identities often hinder success. As the digital landscape evolves, the stakes are higher than ever for enterprises to modernize their IGA strategies.

This session explores the latest research from Omdia, revealing how leading organizations are addressing these challenges. From leveraging AI agents to automating workflows, discover actionable insights that can transform your IGA program into a driver of business value. Whether you’re refining an existing initiative or planning a new one, this session will equip you with the tools and strategies to stay ahead in 2026.

Join Todd Thiemann, Principal Analyst at Omdia, to uncover what’s working, what’s not, and where the future of IGA is headed.

Takeaways:
- Strategies for integrating more applications while controlling costs.
- Insights into rationalizing workforce identity security tool portfolios.
- The role of AI agents in combating deepfakes and enhancing automation.
- Best practices for governing non-human identities (NHIs) and AI agents.
- Key trends shaping the future of enterprise IGA programs.

Elevating Enterprise IGA Programs for the Future

The rapid growth of digital identities, evolving compliance demands and advanced cyber threats have made identity governance and administration (IGA) a critical priority for modern enterprises. Without a structured governance framework, organizations risk operational inefficiencies, data breaches and reputational harm. Issues like access sprawl and privilege misuse are no longer just IT concerns—they are pressing business challenges.

This session will explore how businesses can implement effective IGA strategies to manage identities, ensure compliance and mitigate risks. Learn how to align tools, policies and processes into a cohesive framework that supports enterprise-wide governance. Discover actionable steps to build a compelling business case, standardize global implementation and achieve quick wins that drive executive buy-in.

Join Vincent Amanyi, Founder of Boleaum Inc. to gain practical insights and proven strategies for enabling IGA success at scale.

Key Takeaways:
- Build a persuasive business case to secure board-level approval for IGA initiatives.
- Define a scalable implementation model for geographically dispersed organizations.
- Benchmark and strengthen your organization’s IGA foundation.
- Discover quick-win strategies to accelerate IGA adoption and demonstrate ROI.

Mastering Identity Governance: Strategies for Enterprise Success in 2026

The year 2025 marked a pivotal moment for the Mobile Driving License (mDL) ecosystem in the U.S. With over 20 states, including California and New York, now live and 250+ airports accepting digital credentials, mDLs are no longer experimental—they are becoming a nationwide standard. This represents a transformative shift in how identity is verified, offering businesses and governments new opportunities to enhance security, reduce fraud and streamline operations.

However, scaling mDLs involves navigating complex dynamics between State Issuers, Digital Wallet Providers and Relying Parties under the ISO/IEC 18013 standards. In this session, two independent advisors to state DMVs and industry will break down the "Trust Triangle" and provide actionable insights into the technical and operational foundations enabling secure, interoperable identity verification across state lines and industries.

Join Lucy Yang, Founder and Principal of TechServes Consulting, and David Kelts, Founder and Principal of Decipher Identity, LLC, to explore the future of digital credentials and how your organization can lead in this evolving landscape.

Takeaways:
- Analyze 2025 adoption data to see how mDLs are maturing into a fraud-reducing, scalable infrastructure.
- Discover real-world examples and resources for accepting mDLs in your organization.
- Learn how to position your business as a "Relying Party" and unlock value from verification systems.

Scaling Digital Credentials: The Fast Evolving Landscape of mDL

Identity and access management is at a crossroads. Reliant on passwords and centralized directories, traditional IAM can’t meet the demands of today’s distributed infrastructures and increasingly sophisticated cyber threats. As businesses expand their digital presence, they need adaptable, privacy-preserving solutions to safeguard their assets and ensure seamless operations across ecosystems. But implementing these approaches isn’t without its challenges. 

Modern IAM offers transformative opportunities through decentralized identity models and blockchain-enabled verifiable credentials. These replace static identifiers with cryptographically signed proofs, allowing organizations to achieve tamper-proof identity verification, transparent lifecycle management and enhanced privacy. These new solutions align with zero trust principles, paving the way for trust-minimized environments that prioritize security and user control.

Join Yeghisabet Alaverdyan, Senior Researcher and Associate Professor at IIAP MESCSA RA, to share her insights on how the latest IAM strategies are redefining identity management for the modern age.

Takeaways:
- Discover why traditional IAM systems are not suited to modern infrastructures.
- Learn how decentralized identity models enhance security, privacy and user autonomy.
- Understand the role of blockchain in verifiable credentials and tamper-proof identity management.
- Explore how emerging IAM protocols align with zero trust principles. Gain actionable insights to future-proof your organization’s identity strategy.

Modern IAM: Decentralized Solutions for Evolving Threats

Organizations excel at documenting incidents but fail catastrophically at remembering them. Between audits, hard-won lessons evaporate, cultural knowledge resets to zero and enterprises find themselves vulnerable to the same predictable risks that should have been eliminated months ago.

This session reframes security culture as a living control system where organizational memory becomes your strongest defense. Discover how to transform retrospectives into measurable feedback loops, quantify learning as risk reduction and embed institutional knowledge into governance frameworks that create compounding resilience rather than cyclical vulnerability.

Join Oksana Denesiuk, Senior Product Manager at Kaiser Permanente and ISSA Advisory Board Member, to explore proven methodologies for building unbreakable organizational memory.

Key Takeaways: 
- Track how lessons learned translate into behavioral change and improved security posture. 
- Build lasting organizational memory through structured post-incident processes that strengthen defenses over time.
- Measure how well your organization learns from incidents and translate that into reduced security risks.
- Transform retrospectives into measurable feedback loops that prevent incident recurrence. 
- Embed organizational knowledge into leadership and accountability models for sustained cultural transformation.

Transform Security Culture into Measurable Organizational Memory

As organizations embrace AI systems and hybrid workforces, traditional security cultures focused only on human awareness can no longer address today’s complex risks. AI operates at machine speed, influencing decisions and actions in ways that demand a more integrated approach to managing security. Without a culture that accounts for both human and AI behaviors, organizations risk blind spots that could undermine trust, governance, and resilience.

Security culture needs to become a shared model where leadership, governance and incentives guide both human decisions and the design, training and accountability of AI systems. By viewing AI actions as part of the risk landscape and aligning human and machine behaviors with business goals, security leaders can transform culture into a measurable control and a strategic advantage in an AI-driven world.

Join Sandra Estok, CEO & Founder of Way2Protect, to uncover practical strategies for managing security behaviors, bridging human and AI risks, and effectively communicating with executives and boards.

Key Takeaways
- Understand how security culture must evolve to address both human and AI-driven behaviors.
- Learn to treat AI actions as part of the organization’s risk surface.
- Explore practical methods to measure security behaviors in hybrid work environments.
- Discover how leadership decisions shape human conduct and AI system outcomes.
- Gain techniques to communicate human and AI risks to boards in clear business terms.

Evolving Security Culture: Aligning Human and AI Risks for Business Resilience

Since technology cannot keep us completely protected, organizations must embrace a culture of cybersecurity to build true resilience. This cultural transformation is essential to safeguard against risks and ensure readiness to respond effectively when incidents occur.

This session explores how leading organizations are embedding cybersecurity into their values, attitudes, and practices. By fostering a culture of resilience, businesses can strengthen their ability to anticipate, adapt to, and recover from cyber threats. Learn why every manager has a pivotal role in shaping this culture and how to implement strategies that drive lasting change.

Join Dr. Keri Pearlson, Principal Research Scientist at MIT Sloan School of Management, to explore actionable steps for building a culture of cybersecurity that protects your organization and empowers your workforce.

Takeaways:
- Understand cyber resilience thinking and how it differs from traditional protection strategies.
- Discover key mechanisms for fostering an effective cybersecurity culture.
- Gain actionable insights for managers to enhance resilience at work and home.
- Learn from real-world examples of organizations successfully embedding cybersecurity into their culture.

Building Cyber Resilience Through Culture in 2026

Mergers and acquisitions create exponential cyber risk exposure, yet many organizations lack quantified risk frameworks to guide critical business decisions. As cyber threats evolve and regulatory scrutiny intensifies, executives need concrete data to balance growth opportunities against security investments.

Traditional risk assessments fail during rapid organizational change. This session reveals proven methodologies for translating cyber vulnerabilities into financial impact metrics that drive boardroom decisions. Learn to build communication frameworks that align security investments with business objectives while maintaining stakeholder confidence throughout complex organizational transitions.

Join Vincent Amanyi, Founder of Boleaum Inc, to explore actionable strategies for enterprise cyber risk quantification and communication.

Key Takeaways: 
- Develop risk appetite frameworks that identify, prioritize, and absorb organizational risks with minimal business disruption. 
- Master cyber risk quantification techniques that assign tangible dollar values to security threats across all business levels.
- Build structured communication models to effectively convey cyber risk criticality to diverse stakeholder groups. 
- Implement scalable cybersecurity benchmarking practices for growing organizations. 
- Create boardroom-ready risk reports that support strategic decision-making during M&A activities.

Quantify Cyber Risk Impact for Strategic M&A Growth

Breaches have become a daily reality. Dark web activities and emerging threat vectors outpace traditional defenses, creating blind spots that adversaries readily exploit. Without early warning systems, businesses remain vulnerable to sophisticated attacks that could have been prevented.

Effective Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) transforms raw intelligence into actionable insights that enable proactive defense strategies. This session demonstrates how to operationalize intelligence, map adversary tactics to business risks, and implement early warning systems that prevent breaches before they occur. Learn to distinguish signal from noise and convert threat intelligence into measurable risk reduction metrics that resonate with executive leadership.

Leverage Cyber Threat Intelligence for Proactive Risk Mitigation

Open-source software drives enterprise innovation, but unmanaged vulnerabilities create operational risks and regulatory exposure. As cyber threats evolve and compliance frameworks tighten, executives face mounting pressure to balance innovation speed with robust security governance.

Traditional approaches to OSS security often create friction between development teams and security requirements, leading to shadow IT practices and increased exposure. This session presents proven frameworks for integrating security into OSS workflows while maintaining developer productivity and meeting emerging regulatory demands like the EU Cyber Resilience Act.

Join Yesenia Yser, Security Engineer and Open-Source Advocate, to explore enterprise-grade strategies for OSS risk management.



Key Takeaways: 

Implement governance frameworks that protect OSS dependencies without slowing development
Create shared accountability between security, procurement, and engineering teams
Apply SLSA, SBOM, and OpenSSF standards to build enterprise-wide security trust
Balance regulatory requirements with collaborative open source community practices 
Turn OSS security management into a strategic business differentiator

Securing Open-Source Dependencies at Enterprise Scale

The current data security and privacy protection landscape is awash with tools, acronyms, buzzwords that promise to make data breaches and privacy incidents a thing of the past. Yet hotel chains, healthcare providers, banks, department stores and even governments constantly fall victim to data breaches, ransomware or nation-state attacks. 

The plain truth is that tools are only as good as the people that use them and the processes that go with it. Two thousand years ago, the Roman empire had better military tools than the nations they conquered. Yet through time, the Romans fell to the barbarians and are merely remembered through their ruins. Likewise, companies with the latest and most buzzworthy technology implemented still manage to fall victim to attacks. 

In this presentation, industry thought leader Ralph Villanueva will tap into over 15 years’ experience of data security and privacy protection to show why ultimately, the people behind the tools and the processes they use matter more in securing your organization’s data. 

Key Takeaways:
 - How to best deploy tools in the most cost-effective way to optimize benefits.
 - How to best deploy tools to mitigate data security risks from internal and external threats. 
 - The importance of a balanced and holistic approach to data security that equally considers people, processes and technology.

Tools are Nothing: Why People and Process Matter More in Data Security and Privacy

Data security has entered a new era, one defined by AI-powered threats, expanding cloud ecosystems, and evolving global privacy regulations. 

This session presented by TD Bank's Pankul Chitrav explores the critical shifts reshaping how organisations must protect sensitive information in a boundaryless digital world. We will break down the top risks, the essential capabilities of modern security architectures, and the must-have tools for protecting data across endpoints, cloud platforms, and AI workflows. From zero trust to automated posture management and advanced data discovery, you’ll learn what’s required to stay ahead of adversaries and maintain compliance. Whether you’re modernising your security program or building one from the ground up, this talk equips you with the insights needed to create a future-ready data protection strategy for 2025 and beyond.

Future-Ready Data Protection: Securing Modern Data Ecosystems in an AI-Driven World

Cyberattacks are continuing at pace and we're regularly hearing of new data breaches. But who is responsible for ensuring the security of personal data? 

Traditional data protection approaches are failing against modern attack vectors. Organizations need future-ready strategies that go beyond compliance checkboxes to create resilient security frameworks. In this session, we'll explore the current risks to personal data & privacy and delve into the range of models that can be used to protect your organizations critical assets.

This webinar will take you through examples of recent data breaches, identifying the challenges being experienced, learning from what went wrong and how best organizations can plan for the future. Such planning will investigate current good practice, adding some “steroids” to them such that organizations can hopefully stay in front of the next “breach”!

Steve Yates – Chairman of the Resilience Association, will share frontline experience about critical data assets security and protection of user privacy.  

Key Takeaways:

- Be aware of the challenges being experienced in the protection of data security & privacy;
- Understand how best to plan your data resources and capacity to meet tomorrow’s defense;
- Discover the core organizational elements needed for the establishment of a strategic, tactical and operational solution

Strengthen Data Security Strategy for Tomorrow's Resilience Defense

AWS infrastructure offers robust native security mechanisms, but the shared responsibility model places critical configuration burdens on app owners. This creates gaps that attackers can actively exploit through misconfigurations, privilege escalation, and cross-service vulnerabilities which can compromise entire cloud deployments.

Security automation emerges as an essential defense strategy for threat modeling, enabling businesses to enforce security best practices from deployment through ongoing operations. Automated security controls provide continuous monitoring, real-time threat detection, and optimized remediation across AWS services. This ensures a consistent security posture while reducing human error and response times.

Join Ernesto Marquez, Founder and Project Director at Concurrency Labs, to explore proven AWS security automation strategies for threat mitigation.

Key Takeaways: 

- Implement automated security controls that enforce best practices across AWS services 
- Deploy continuous monitoring and real-time threat detection for multicloud environments 
- Configure automated remediation workflows for common security vulnerabilities 
- Integrate AWS security automation tools into comprehensive threat modeling frameworks 
- Establish governance policies that maintain security consistency across cloud deployments

Deploy Automated AWS Defenses for Threat Prevention

As cloud supply chain attacks escalate in sophistication, traditional SBOMs alone prove insufficient for comprehensive security. While SBOMs provide valuable component inventories, they lack runtime verification capabilities—creating a critical blind spot that malicious actors increasingly exploit. This gap between static analysis and runtime behavior represents one of the most significant vulnerabilities in modern cloud environments.

The "Bill of Behavior" (BoB) approach addresses this challenge by providing vendor-supplied profiles of expected runtime behaviors. Generated using eBPF technology, BoBs codify legitimate syscalls, file access patterns and network communications. This enables immediate anomaly detection without custom rule creation, allowing organizations to verify software integrity throughout the supply chain and during execution, dramatically reducing the attack surface while simplifying security operations.

Join Dr. Constanze Roedig, Key Researcher at SBA-Research and Founder of Fusioncore.ai, to discover how this emerging standard complements existing SBOM frameworks to create verifiable trust in your cloud ecosystem.

Key Takeaways:
- Understand how Software Bills of Behavior (SBoBs) create verifiable trust between vendors and clients
- Learn practical implementation strategies using existing OCI distribution standards
- Discover how BoBs significantly reduce attack surfaces across both runtime and supply chain vectors
- Explore immediate benefits of receiving vendor-supplied behavior profiles with software packages
- Discover how CNCF Kubescape allows anomaly detection out of the box

Beyond SBOMs: Runtime Verification for Bulletproof Cloud Supply Chains

Organizations are rapidly adopting AI technologies without fully understanding the security implications. This is creating unprecedented vulnerabilities in cloud environments. In turn, with AI accessible to all stakeholders, the human factor has become the weakest link in cybersecurity defense strategies.

This session addresses critical considerations for IT and cybersecurity leaders to balance business innovation with risk management. Learn how to establish ethical AI frameworks, implement proper access controls, and build awareness programs that protect your organization while enabling AI adoption.

Join Kathleen Mullin, vCISO and Consultant, to explore practical strategies for securing AI in cloud environments while maintaining business agility.

Key takeaways:

• Define clear RACI matrices for AI business risk ownership and accountability 
• Assess whether AI solutions truly meet business requirements vs. alternative approaches
• Establish data governance and access controls specifically for cloud-based AI systems 
• Develop comprehensive AI awareness programs for organizational stakeholders 
• Evaluate current and future cloud AI risks within your security framework

Considerations: Securing the Cloud And In Specific AI

As organizations accelerate cloud adoption, sophisticated security technologies often create a false sense of protection while the most significant threats emerge from within. Human behaviour continues to be the weakest link in cloud security, not due to malicious intent, but through everyday mistakes that inadvertently expose critical systems.

When they create friction, security measures designed to protect can inadvertently increase risk as users will find shortcuts to achieve their legitimate objectives. This session explores the psychology behind user decision-making and reveals how threat actors exploit human nature to bypass cloud defenses, turning legitimate business processes into attack vectors.

Join Simon Ratcliffe, independent management & technology consultant, to discover practical strategies for human-centered cloud security.

Key Takeaways:

- Identify psychological triggers that make users vulnerable to cloud-based attacks 
- Recognize how security friction drives risky user behaviors and workarounds
- Design user-centric security that reduces human error without compromising protection 
- Develop indicators to detect insider threats before they escalate 
- Build security awareness programs that create lasting behavioral change

Securing the Human Element: Why People Remain Cloud Security's Top Vulnerability in 2025

Identity and Access Management Summit

As identity becomes the primary attack vector in cybersecurity, the rise of AI-driven adversaries is reshaping the threat landscape. From deepfake-enabled social engineering to synthetic identities, attackers are using AI to bypass authentication, steal credentials and escalate privileges. For businesses, the stakes are higher than ever: compromised identities can lead to data breaches, financial losses and reputational damage.

Traditional defenses that rely on static policies and point-in-time authentication are no longer sufficient. To combat these sophisticated threats, organizations need to adopt modern controls that prioritize continuous authentication, employ behavioural analytics and privilege minimization. This session will provide actionable insights into how AI-assisted detection and governance frameworks can bolster resilience and protect against evolving identity-based attacks.

Join Oksana Denesiuk, Senior Product Manager at Kaiser Permanente and ISSA Advisory Board Member, to explore cutting-edge strategies for securing identities in an AI-driven world.

Key Takeaways:
- Understand the latest AI-enabled identity threats, including deepfakes and synthetic identities.
- Learn how continuous authentication and behavioral analytics can mitigate risks.
- Discover practical steps to modernize access management programs.
- Explore governance frameworks for AI-assisted detection and oversight.
- Gain actionable strategies to make identity your first line of defense.

Defending Against AI-Driven Identity Threats in 2026

Artificial Intelligence

Threat Landscape

Authentication

Identity Management

Access Management

Identity Services

Data Breach

Identity Theft

Cyber Resilience

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Defending Against AI-Driven Identity Threats in 2026

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