SecureWorld Twin Cities 2026

Come to the Registration desk in the lobby to check-in and get your badge. SecureWorld staff will be available throughout the day if you have any questions.

Your opportunity to visit our solution vendor partners, whose sponsorship makes SecureWorld possible, as well as association chapters! Booths have staff ready to answer your questions. Look for participating Dash For Prizes sponsors to be entered to win prizes.

Also, look for “Cyber Connect” discussions on select topics and join the conversation.

Moderated discussion for SecureWorld Advisory Council members. By invite only.

Come join this guest speaker presentation of the InfraGard Minnesota Members Alliance.

One click during a routine water-treatment pen test, and, boom! now looking at a live SCADA control panel—pumps spinning, valves indicating, chemical mixing—running on the public internet with no authentication. It relayed any backend command an attacker wanted to send: read alarms, override setpoints, dump the entire configuration including encrypted operator credentials. The vendor’s response when this was disclosed? “Just enable authentication.” The fix wasn’t a fix.

Three years later, that same backdoor still ships, still hits hundreds of internet-exposed deployments, and now there’s a new development: re-analyzation of the entire codebase in an afternoon found 41 more vulnerabilities, including five end-to-end attack chains the original engagement never had time to enumerate. One of those chains is reverse-engineering the vendor’s “proprietary encryption,” which turns out to be a hardcoded key the same in every shipped binary!

This presentation shows five working attack chains for this (live, running) software package and does an in-depth walkthrough of one, showcasing the exploitation process. By the end, attendees will understand why any security program’s biggest exposure isn’t the code the team wrote; it’s the vendor software running inside the perimeter.

Session details to come.

Visit the Networking Hall to network with attendees and connect with our supporting solution providers and association partners.

Visit the Networking Hall to network with attendees and connect with our supporting solution providers and association partners.

As cybersecurity continues to evolve, so does the need for professionals who can seamlessly connect security initiatives with business objectives. Enter the Business Information Security Officer (BISO)—a critical yet often misunderstood role.

In this engaging panel discussion, regional BISOs share insights into their responsibilities, challenges, and the strategic impact they have within their organizations. Whether you’re a technical professional looking to advance your career or an executive seeking to understand the business side of cybersecurity, this session helps demystify the BISO role and its importance in today’s security landscape.

Attendees will gain:

• A clear understanding of what a BISO does and how they differ from CISOs and other security leaders
• Insights into how technical professionals can develop the business acumen necessary to transition into leadership roles
• Practical strategies for bridging the gap between security and business priorities

Join us to explore the intersection of business and security and how mastering both can accelerate your career.

What happens when a serious threat unfolds and every decision changes what comes next? In this interactive workshop, participants step inside General Mills’ multi-disciplinary threat simulations and explore how security, technology, business, and operational teams respond to complex, high-impact scenarios.

Through a choose-your-own-disaster format, the session examines the tradeoffs, dependencies, and consequences that emerge when teams must act with incomplete information and competing priorities. Attendees will gain practical insight into designing realistic simulations, strengthening cross-functional decision-making, clarifying accountability, and turning exercise outcomes into meaningful improvements in organizational readiness and resilience.

AI is rapidly becoming one of the biggest drivers of productivity and innovation in the enterprise—and one of the fastest-growing sources of data security risk. As copilots, assistants, and public AI tools become integrated into daily work, sensitive data is flowing into systems that most security teams can’t fully see, understand, or control.

The problem is that traditional data security controls were never built for this. In fact, many organizations were already struggling to operationalize data security before AI accelerated the challenge. The good news? AI isn’t just creating the problem—it’s also enabling a smarter, more effective way to solve it.

In this session, attendees will learn:

• Why AI has become one of the fastest-growing and least visible sources of enterprise risk 
• How GenAI is creating new exposure points for sensitive data 
• Why legacy data security tools have failed to keep up—and why AI is making those gaps harder to ignore 
• How context-aware, AI-driven data security can deliver more accurate visibility, stronger controls, and real-time enforcement 
• What organizations can do to enable AI innovation without expanding their risk surface 

Attendees will leave with a clearer understanding of how AI is reshaping data security—and how they can use that same technology to gain control, minimize exposure, and support safer AI adoption across the business.

Visit the Networking Hall to network with attendees and connect with our supporting solution providers and association partners.

Sessions details to come.

Moderated discussion for SecureWorld Advisory Council members. By invite only.

In an era where “black box” security departments are becoming a liability, Winnebago is flipping the script by turning cybersecurity into a high-visibility, collaborative experience. This session takes you behind the scenes of its signature Annual Cyber Resiliency Strategy Event—a high-energy, hands-on day where the barriers between internal teams and external vendor partners vanish.

Discover how they transform a standard training room into a live “security expo,” with interactive stations that demystify the complex tech stacks keeping the company secure. The Winnebago team will break down how this event serves as the cornerstone of their year-round Transparency Strategy. From podcasts and videos to monthly newsletters, learn the specific tactics they use to keep leadership informed, engaged, and invested in the “good” being done by the security team.

Agentic AI doesn’t fail like traditional software. It reasons past faults, improvises around bad inputs, and keeps acting, which means a single hallucinated data point can cascade through a multi-agent workflow before anyone notices. Most organizations are racing to deploy autonomous agents without architecting for the moment those agents are wrong. This session makes the case that fail-safe design is not a constraint on agentic AI adoption, it’s the precondition for scaling it responsibly.

Drawing on three decades building enterprise security programs and his framework for sustained cyber resilience, Gary Hayslip will lay out a practical architecture for containing agentic AI failure: bounded authority and least-privilege for autonomous actors, circuit breakers at points of irreversible consequence, observable reasoning for post-incident accountability, and designed degradation paths when agents hit ambiguity. Attendees will leave with a concrete framework for evaluating whether their own agentic deployments are built to fail safely and the board-ready language to make the case for the investment before the first incident forces the conversation.

As organizational footprints expand across cloud, SaaS, OT/IoT, and dispersed workforces, defenders face a more complex and interconnected digital battlefield. This panel brings together experts to explore how today’s threat actors combine automation, social engineering, identity breaches, and software supply-chain attacks into highly coordinated assaults.

Panelists will examine the expanding importance of identity in the modern SOC, the emergence of AI-driven threats such as automated reconnaissance and deepfake-assisted breaches, and how fourth-party dependencies are changing risk visibility. The discussion also connects these trends to organizational resilience—showing how teams can improve detection, response, and business continuity across an evolving attack surface. This comprehensive session provides practical insights for any security leader seeking clarity amid converging threats.

Visit the Networking Hall to network with attendees and connect with our supporting solution providers and association partners.

A customer support rep pastes a batch of unredacted tickets into a free AI chatbot to save twenty minutes on a slow afternoon. Three weeks later, it’s a full-blown incident. This session puts the room in the driver’s seat of exactly that moment. Attendees vote live from their phones at each turning point, from the first technical call on containing the exposure through the investigation, the disclosure decision, and what changes afterward, watching in real time how the room’s instincts split and where they align.

Rather than a lecture on AI risk, this is a hands-on decision exercise that reveals how different roles—technical, investigative, and leadership—each face a different high-stakes call as an incident unfolds, and how those calls compound. Attendees leave with a sharper instinct for how AI-related incidents actually move through an organization, and where the highest-leverage decisions sit at every level, not just the top.

Visit the Networking Hall to network with attendees and connect with our supporting solution providers and association partners.

Securing operational technology (OT) environments is critical to ensuring the safe, reliable, and continued operation of an organization’s most important assets. However, successful OT security requires more than deploying tools or enforcing policies—it depends on building trust, aligning with operational priorities, and delivering capabilities that help OT teams operate more safely and securely. This session explores practical ways to gain OT buy-in by positioning security as an enabler of operational resilience rather than a barrier to productivity.

Session details to come.

AI is revolutionizing cybersecurity at all levels, speeding up detection and enabling automated attacks on an unprecedented scale. This session examines AI’s dual role as both a powerful defensive tool and a new threat vector for attackers. Panelists will discuss how AI copilots enhance analyst workflows, triage, and anomaly detection, while also addressing emerging risks such as LLM data leakage, prompt injection, model poisoning, and hallucinations within high-trust SOC processes.

The discussion will cover AI governance and assurance frameworks, evolving regulatory expectations, and the impact of synthetic content—including deepfakes, audio spoofing, and hyper-personalized phishing—on social engineering defenses. Attendees will leave with a solid understanding of AI’s potential, the safety measures needed for responsible deployment, and practical steps for preparing teams and pipelines for an AI-driven threat environment.

Visit the Networking Hall to network with attendees and connect with our supporting solution providers and association partners.

Cybercriminals don’t care how large your business is—they care whether you’re easy to compromise.

This practical session focuses on the 10 cybersecurity practices that provide the greatest reduction in risk for small and mid-sized businesses. Attendees will learn how to defend against ransomware, business email compromise, credential theft, insider threats, and data loss without enterprise-sized budgets or teams.

Leave with a practical roadmap you can begin implementing immediately to strengthen your organization’s cyber resilience. Participants will learn:

• Where SMBs are actually getting attacked today
• Which security investments provide the biggest return
• Techniques for building a cyber program on a limited budget & resources
• How to prepare for the day something goes wrong
• How to build resilience instead of simply buying more technology

Session details to come.

People have always been the most targeted layer in any organization’s security posture—but AI is rewriting the rules of engagement. Sophisticated phishing campaigns now arrive personalized at scale, deepfake audio and video are eroding the credibility of internal communications, and MFA fatigue attacks are turning security controls against the users they were designed to protect. The threat surface hasn’t changed, but the speed, precision, and plausibility of attacks targeting it have.

At the same time, defenders are gaining new tools. Behavioral analytics and UEBA platforms are surfacing anomalies that static rules would miss, and AI-assisted policy frameworks are helping organizations govern workforce behavior—including how employees interact with AI tools themselves—without sacrificing productivity. This panel brings together practitioners navigating insider risk, identity-based threats, and the governance questions that arise when the line between human error and AI-augmented deception becomes increasingly hard to draw.

This is your final chance to visit the Networking Hall and get scanned by our participating partners for our Dash for Prizes. You can also turn in your Passport cards at the Registration Desk before we announce our winner!

Participating sponsors will announce their Dash for Prizes winners directly following the closing keynote in the Keynote Theater. Must be present to win.

Join your peers at the Mall of America – Studio on 4 (just down from the SecureWorld conference location at the JW Marriott Minneapolis Mall of America) for the fourth year of the annual tradition, bringing the Twin Cities’ Information Security community together to kick off the holiday season with a social! This is a time to celebrate the power of connection, to reflect on major events of the year, and to contemplate our future together in cybersecurity.

Your hosts this year represent the local Minnesota chapters of ISSA, WiCyS, InfraGard, and MCPA, along with sponsorship from the area’s premier technology and consulting firms. We are also pleased to announce that SecureWorld is partnering with ISSA, WiCyS, InfraGard, and MCPA to deliver this great event at the end of the SecureWorld conference.

Please register separately here for the 4th Annual End of Year Cheer. You are encouraged to attend SecureWorld Twin Cities (register here for the conference) and stay for the holiday party event.

If you are attending both events, you must register for both.