The events at Solarwinds, JB Poindexter and the Port of Houston were transformational and involved very different risks (deep supply chain, ransomware and foreign national malware) across diverse industries (high tech, manufacturing and critical infrastructure).  This panel of CISOs at these companies during the incidents will convey important lessons learned, and discuss root causes, response effectiveness, and best practices to fortify your defenses.

AI is quickly becoming embedded across business processes, applications, and decision-making.  Building from panels on the same topic at the other Houston Forums (CISO, CIO and CDO/AI Leaders), this panel explores how CISOs are enabling AI adoption while addressing data exposure, governance, non-human identities, model risk, and the evolving security challenges that come with operating an AI-enabled enterprise.

OT security has matured fast in prevention and detection, but recovery remains the weak link. IT recovery practices are well established, while OT environments face unique constraints, including legacy systems, physical processes, and safety requirements, that make traditional recovery approaches fall short.

This session examines why OT recovery lags, what drives increased scrutiny from regulators and advisory bodies, and what CISOs should be asking their teams right now. We'll cover CISA's AA26-097A advisory, the updated recovery plan requirements in NERC CIP-009-7.1, and how Copia can help bridge the recovery gap.

Adoption of agentic AI coding and cowork agents such as Cursor, Claude Code, Claude CoWork and Codex is skyrocketing. Security teams have been scrambling to meet the challenges this of the new attack surface created by the complex fabric of interacting AI agents, skills, MCPs, hooks, connectors and other components on user laptops and workstations.

We've already seen how tools such as OpenClaw can break trust boundaries and create backdoors into endpoints, but even commercial tools with better security controls and permissions can be manipulated once extended via external tools using MCPs, hooks and skills.

In this talk we will cover:

• What the new ecosystem look like, and why it represents a huge blind spot for security teams
   
• The threat surface it creates and what unvetted and unsupervised agentic AI dev tools and MCPs can do, from prompt injection to privilege escalation and RCE
   
• Why the defaults and internal security controls provided by vendors such as Cursor are not sufficient
   
• Which best practices and free tools can be used for discovery, visiblity and hardening of this new stack

Cybersecurity leaders are expected to do more than manage risk—they must communicate it in terms that drive business decisions.  Join this panel to learn practical strategies for translating complex cyber risks into compelling business narratives that engage boards, influence executives, and secure support for critical security initiatives.

The enterprise is no longer confined to corporate networks. As organizations become more dependent on third parties, cloud ecosystems, machine identities, critical infrastructure, and autonomous systems, security leaders must rethink how they manage trust, exposure, resilience, and emerging cyber risk.