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DAY 1 — OCTOBER 5TH

2:00 pm

6:00 pm

Registration & Badge Pickup

3:00 pm

6:00 pm

Capture the Flag

Day 1 of 3

3:30 pm

4:30 pm

Mike Glyer (VulnCheck Workshop)

Get free from the 503: leaving NVD for a more trustworthy partner

5:00 pm

8:00 pm

Exhibit Hall Opens

6:00 pm

8:00 pm

Welcome Cocktail Reception w/ Live DJ

DAY 2— OCTOBER 6TH

8:30 am

3:00 pm

Registration & Badge Pickup

8:30 am

9:15 am

Breakfast

9:15 am

9:30 am

Welcome Remarks + Keynote Intro

9:30 am

10:00 am

Keynote: Gen. Paul Nakasone (Ret.)

Charting the Course of National Security in a Digital World

10:00 am

6:00 pm

Exhibit Hours + CTF

10:00 am

5:30 pm

VulnCheck Office Hours

Session 1

10:30 am

11:00 am

Benjamin Harris, Founder & CEO, watchTowr

From Weeks to Hours: AI and the Death of the Patching Window

Technical Track

Session 1

10:30 am

11:00 am

Doc McConnell, Head of Policy and Compliance, Finite State

Show Your Work: The Engineering Behind Credible Regulatory Documentation

Showcase Track

Session 1

10:30 am

11:00 am

Scott Kuffer, Co-Founder and CPO, Nucleus Security

What AI Coding Teaches Us About the Future of Exposure Management

Technical Track

Session 2

11:10 am

11:40 am

Jacob Baines, CTO, VulnCheck

ENDLESSDOORS Is Phoning Home

Technical Track

Session 2

11:10 am

11:40 am

Eric Forte, Senior Security Research Engineer, Elastic

The Accepted Bypass, Using STUN/TURN Patterns for C2

Technical Track

Session 2

11:10 am

11:40 am

John Rodriguez, Senior AI Engineer, VulnCheck

Found ≠ Fixed: The Gap Between Vulnerability Discovery and Actionability

Independent researchers are incentivized to identify vulnerabilities. Vendors and bug-bounty triage processes, however, are incentivized differently, and it is in this divergence that many critical findings fail to progress toward remediation.

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This presentation examines that divergence, drawing on more than fifteen independent vendor research campaigns and over three hundred findings across network appliances, endpoint detection and response (EDR) and antivirus (AV) agents, and enterprise software. The analysis is grounded in documented case evidence rather than anecdote, and considers four representative cases:

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Silent patching followed by rejection, documented on the record. A consumer router vendor released a firmware update addressing a pre-authentication credential-disclosure vulnerability, with release notes stating only that "various security issues" had been fixed;no CVE was assigned, no advisory was published, and no researcher credit was given. When the same vulnerability class was subsequently reported on a related product, the triaging analyst closed the report, stating: "Since this issue was fixed before your report was submitted, it is considered a known issue... this does not qualify for a bounty." This constitutes a documented instance in which silent patching was used as grounds to decline coordinated disclosure.

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The evidentiary burden imposed by attack-scenario requirements. This case examines why mature vulnerability disclosure programs increasingly decline technically valid root-cause findings that lack a demonstrated privilege-boundary crossing, on the reasoning that "root-to-root" access does not constitute privilege escalation, and considers the resulting effect on which vulnerabilities are ultimately remediated versus merely discovered.

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Reclassification of demonstrated abuse as intended functionality. A widely deployed AI-powered customer-messaging platform permitted an authenticated integration to register a webhook that intercepted the entirety of a customer's support conversations, including authentication tokens embedded in message content, and to silently alter message-routing configuration without administrative notification. The vendor closed the report as "by design," on the basis that webhook registration is an intended platform capability. This case illustrates a mechanism by which a technically substantiated, live-confirmed disclosure vector is rendered non-actionable not through denial or an evidentiary bar, but through characterization of the vulnerable behavior itself as intended.

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Self-examination of automated triage tooling. This case presents an account of identifying a failure in the presenter's own AI-assisted triage pipeline, in which a batch of false positives was automatically promoted to "vetted" status, temporarily inflating publicly reported finding counts prior to correction.

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This presentation does not argue that coordinated disclosure is fundamentally broken. Rather, it offers a practitioner's account of where the vulnerability discovery-to-remediation pipeline fails in practice, together with a proposed set of criteria distinguishing findings that are merely technically correct from those that are genuinely actionable.

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Showcase Track

11:50 am

1:00 pm

Lunch (Exhibit Hall)

Session 3

1:10 pm

1:40 pm

Chris Holt, Strategic Engagement & Community Architect, Intigriti

The OASIS Project: A Movement for Crowd-Sourced Fix Automation

Technical Track

Session 3

1:10 pm

1:40 pm

Jonathan Peterson, Initial Access Tech Lead, VulnCheck

GitHub Exploits: The Good, the Bad, the AI, and the Bitcoin Scams

Technical Track

Session 3

1:10 pm

1:40 pm

Alex Waintraub, Practice Leader — Director of Threat Management, Waintraub Cyber Solutions

From Initial Access to Detonation: Reconstructing a Modern Ransomware Kill Chain

Technical Track

Session 4

1:50 pm

2:20 pm

Steve Cobb, Field CISO, Zafran

DifyTap: Silently Wiretapping Multi-Tenant AI

Technical Track

Session 4

1:50 pm

2:20 pm

Will Dormann, Senior Principal Vulnerability Analyst, Tharros

Compositional Risks: Exploiting MIDI Playback on Windows to Achieve SYSTEM Privileges

Technical Track

Session 4

1:50 pm

2:20 pm

Ryan Nolette, Technical Lead, AWS Vulnerability Disclosure Program, AWS

Coordinated Disclosure: Protecting Customers Behind the Scenes

Showcase Track

Session 5

2:30 pm

3:00 pm

Kazuki Omo, Security Researcher / Executive Officer, SIOS Technology Inc.

When Is a CVE Actually Usable? Measuring NVD Vulnerability Intelligence Maturation Through Daily Snapshots

Technical Track

Session 5

2:30 pm

3:00 pm

Landon Rice, Senior Exploit Developer, VulnCheck‍

How UAT-8616 Pwned Cisco SD-WAN: A Post-Mortem of CVE-2026-20127

Technical Track

Session 5

2:30 pm

3:00 pm

Mehul Revankar, Co-Founder & CPO, Quantro Security, Inc.

Exploiting Vulnerabilities at scale with AI

Showcase Track

3:00 pm

3:30 pm

Networking + Snack Break (Exhibit Hall)

Session 6

3:40 pm

4:10 pm

Peter Allen, Regional Director, Asimily

Enforced Once, Drifted Forever: Why Segmentation Policies Stop Matching the Network

Showcase Track

Session 6

3:40 pm

4:10 pm

Joe Szczerba, Chief Information Security Officer, Delphos Labs

The Binary Does Not (Usually?) Lie: A Reverse Engineering Field Report

Technical Track

Session 6

3:40 pm

4:10 pm

Josh Bressers, Director of Coordinated Vulnerability Disclosure, VulnCheck

Is open source broken and does it need to be fixed?

Technical Track

Session 7

4:20 pm

4:50 pm

Gil Maman, Co-Founder and CTO, Pluto Security

Breaking the Control Plane: Exploiting MCP Servers in AI Workflows

Technical Track

Session 7

4:20 pm

4:50 pm

Mike Reed, Co-Founder & COO, Realis Solutions

The Four Ways Companies Buy Security Now, and Why Your Vendor Doesn't Fit Any of Them

Showcase Track

Session 7

4:20 pm

4:50 pm

Adrian Sanabria, Founder and Principal Researcher, The Defender's Initiative

Understanding Vulnerability Value through Weighted Hindsight Analysis

Technical Track

Session 8

5:00 pm

5:45 pm

Johnny Shaieb, Exposure Management — Global Delivery Leader and Chief Architect, IBM

Axiomatic Events that Evolved Vulnerability Databases

Showcase Track

Session 8

5:00 pm

5:30 pm

John Fitzpatrick, Founder, Lab539

Every Attack Has a Backstory: Understanding the Infrastructure Behind Modern Campaigns

Technical Track

Session 8

5:00 pm

5:45 pm

Steve Cobb, Field CISO, Zafran

Break the Chain: Cutting Exploit Paths at AI Speed, Before the Patch (Premier Sponsor Showcase, 45 mins, 5:00–5:45 pm)

Showcase Track

6:00 pm

8:00 pm

Cocktail Reception w/ Live DJ (Exhibit Hall)

DAY 3— OCTOBER 7TH

8:30 am

10:00 am

Registration & Badge Pickup

8:30 am

9:30 am

Breakfast

9:00 am

12:00 pm

VulnCheck Office Hours

Session 9

9:40 am

10:10 am

Raj Badhwar, Chief Information Officer (CIO), SPA

As threat actors deploy automated, machine-speed exploits to target corporate infrastructure, human-in-the-loop triage is becoming a critical bottleneck. Defenders must transition from passive security tools to goal-oriented, autonomous Agentic AI systems capable of real-time threat containment. However, introducing self-directed software agents that operate with delegated intent into highly regulated, high-security enterprise environments introduces unprecedented operational, security, and compliance risks. When we authorize an autonomous asset to modify firewalls, isolate production endpoints, or query sensitive corporate data repositories, how do we enforce policy-bounded execution control without completely neutralizing the speed advantages of AI?

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Drawing directly from the control models and design patterns established in the speaker's book, Agentic AI Security: Designing, Defending, & Governing Autonomous Systems, this session provides enterprise leaders and policy makers with a strategic blueprint for governing autonomous defenses. We will systematically dissect the trust boundaries and abuse paths across the entire lifecycle of agentic execution. The briefing begins by mapping baseline security patterns for foundational automation, including prompt chaining, routing, planning, parallelization, and tool use. We will analyze how vulnerabilities like indirect prompt injection and data poisoning can hijack these basic structures to cause cascading logic failures across enterprise networks.

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Moving into next-generation Generation 5 (Gen 5) systems, we will explore the advanced architectural constructs required to manage continuous execution and probabilistic behavior under active adversarial pressure. The session will look past superficial data-access layers like the Model Context Protocol (MCP) and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to focus on deep orchestration defense. We will dive into the governance of complex agent-to-agent (A2A) interactions and the deployment of specialized Virtual Process Agents (VPA). Crucially, the briefing will demonstrate how to maintain cognitive stability and prevent malicious drift within systems relying on Predictive World Modeling (PWN) and Recursive Self-Optimization (RSO).

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Using secure cloud environments as an operational baseline, this presentation demonstrates how to implement a state-aware AI gateway proxy that sits between non-human AI identities and core enterprise infrastructure. Attendees will leave with a practical roadmap for defining immutable runtime guardrails, enforcing policy-constrained tool use, and strategically engineering human-in-the-loop validation checkpoints. Ultimately, this session provides leaders with the blueprint required to transform autonomous agents from unpredictable black boxes into highly auditable, managed digital assets that satisfy strict corporate risk management and configuration control frameworks.

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Key Learning Objectives: Map Foundational & Gen 5 Agentic Abuse Paths: Identify the specific security vulnerabilities unique to agentic design patterns, from simple prompt chaining and routing to complex multi-agent (A2A) networks. Architect Lifecycle Guardrails for PWN & RSO: Learn how to implement continuous policy enforcement and intent validation around predictive world models and self-optimizing reasoning loops. Enforce Policy-Constrained Tool Use: Discover how to establish rigid trust boundaries between agents, enterprise data lakes via MCP/RAG, and execution tools to prevent unauthorized lateral movement or privilege escalation. Design Compliant Human-in-the-Loop Frameworks: Balance machine-driven intent with necessary human oversight to build forensic-grade, deterministic logs that satisfy strict corporate risk management frameworks.

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Showcase Track

Session 9

9:40 am

10:10 am

Adam Powis, Senior Software Engineer, VulnCheck

Technical Track

Session 9

9:40 am

10:10 am

Justin Timothy, Principal Threat Intelligence Consultant, Guidepoint Research and Intelligence Team (GRIT)

Technical Track

10:00 am

12:00 pm

Exhibit Hours + CTF

Session 10

10:20 am

10:50 am

Ethan Muntz, Strategic Threat Analyst, Health-ISAC

Showcase Track

Session 10

10:20 am

10:50 am

Tim Roberts, Head of Sales Engineering, VulnCheck

Technical Track

Session 10

10:20 am

10:50 am

Thomas MacKenzie, Director of Product Strategy, Lansweeper

Showcase Track

Session 11

11:00 am

11:30 am

Patrick Garrity (moderator), Security Researcher, VulnCheck; Tod Beardsley, runZero; Shelby Cunningham, GitHub; Caitlin Condon, VulnCheck

Showcase Track

Session 11

11:00 am

11:30 am

Taha Siddiqi, Vulnerability Research Intern, TrendAI (lead presenter); Smile Thanapattheerakul, Manager, Research Incubation, TrendAI (co-presenter)

Session 12

11:40 am

12:10 pm

Josh Shomo, Senior Exploit Developer, VulnCheck

Technical Track

Session 12

11:40 am

12:10 pm

Joel Callicrate, Digital Janitorial Consultant, Cisco Talos

What happens to Capture the Flag when insight stops being scarce

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Friday at 9:00 AM, The Salt Crown started. Thirty-person teams, cash prizes, more than 6,000 registered teams. Only eight other people from Cisco signed up.

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I typed go in a terminal and went to make coffee. Rookery version 18 ran on a laptop and is getting better at novel problems. The weakest link that morning was me.

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I had left its submission gate set to never-submit.

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For the first hour and a half, Rookery submitted nothing. When I checked, we had fewer than a dozen of the event's 136 flags and sat in 220th place. I changed the policy: type each flag into Chrome, with a random pause between them.

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Then I went to my five-year-old's art show, a week-long camp of collages, cats, and rainbows. A long way from the CTFs I remember, when a weekend disappeared into digital haystacks hunting the FLAG{} behind a buffer overflow.

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Rookery reported at 3:22 PM that we could no longer win. It was stuck on the two hardest flags, and another team had just taken one of them. Within the hour the last flag fell and someone secured their victory. Seven hours, start to finish. The war room was a coffee mug. Nobody decompiled a state machine at 2 AM.

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The scoreboard credits Rookery with 87 of our team's 135 flags. That number counts who clicked submit, not what the machine knew. Rookery runs 36 agents in parallel. Every time a teammate typed in a flag, it had usually solved that one hours earlier, written it up, and moved on. The true count was 125 flags ready by 2:47 PM, and 134 of 136 by the next morning. Measured that way, we held the lead most of the day. The field only caught us on the two we never cracked.

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Two flags. We missed them this time. Do you really think we won't next time?

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Here is the part that should bother you. Rookery is not the most advanced solver out there. It is not even close. It is Codex with tooling. The work went into the harness around it: a graph memory it revisits, subagents it spawns, feedback loops, swarming, persona diversity, which is not a real technique, except it is. Anything that fits on a normal agent harness is fair game. Eighteen generations, four months, trained on smaller CTFs and tuned by hand. That is the whole recipe. It nearly won a 6,000-team event from a laptop while I was at an art show.

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This talk is the autopsy. I will show how Rookery thinks and where it breaks, then where I take it next. After that, I give it away. All of it.

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Keeping it would be the smart competitive move. It is a real edge and I know it. I am handing it over anyway, because I have already accepted what it proves. The flag used to stand in for human insight. It worked because insight was scarce.

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It is not scarce now. To anyone trying to bar the door against AI in CTFs, I wish you luck. Litigating who used a model in an online competition sounds exhausting.

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I hope organizers find better ways to detect and block the machines instead. That sounds like fun.

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Technical Track

12:00 pm

1:30 pm

Lunch

12:15 pm

12:30 pm

Closing Remarks, CTF Winner Announcements

Exact times subject to change. F&B included. Dedicated exhibit hours all three days.

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THREATCON1 2026 AGENDA

DAY 1 — OCTOBER 5TH

Registration & Badge Pickup

Capture the Flag

Mike Glyer (VulnCheck Workshop)

Exhibit Hall Opens

Welcome Cocktail Reception w/ Live DJ

DAY 2— OCTOBER 6TH

Registration & Badge Pickup

Breakfast

Welcome Remarks + Keynote Intro

Keynote: Gen. Paul Nakasone (Ret.)

Exhibit Hours + CTF

VulnCheck Office Hours

Benjamin Harris, Founder & CEO, watchTowr

Doc McConnell, Head of Policy and Compliance, Finite State

Scott Kuffer, Co-Founder and CPO, Nucleus Security

Jacob Baines, CTO, VulnCheck

Eric Forte, Senior Security Research Engineer, Elastic

John Rodriguez, Senior AI Engineer, VulnCheck

Lunch (Exhibit Hall)

Chris Holt, Strategic Engagement & Community Architect, Intigriti

Jonathan Peterson, Initial Access Tech Lead, VulnCheck

Alex Waintraub, Practice Leader — Director of Threat Management, Waintraub Cyber Solutions

Steve Cobb, Field CISO, Zafran

Will Dormann, Senior Principal Vulnerability Analyst, Tharros

Ryan Nolette, Technical Lead, AWS Vulnerability Disclosure Program, AWS

Kazuki Omo, Security Researcher / Executive Officer, SIOS Technology Inc.

Landon Rice, Senior Exploit Developer, VulnCheck‍

Mehul Revankar, Co-Founder & CPO, Quantro Security, Inc.

Networking + Snack Break (Exhibit Hall)

Peter Allen, Regional Director, Asimily

Joe Szczerba, Chief Information Security Officer, Delphos Labs

Josh Bressers, Director of Coordinated Vulnerability Disclosure, VulnCheck

Gil Maman, Co-Founder and CTO, Pluto Security

Mike Reed, Co-Founder & COO, Realis Solutions

Adrian Sanabria, Founder and Principal Researcher, The Defender's Initiative

Johnny Shaieb, Exposure Management — Global Delivery Leader and Chief Architect, IBM

John Fitzpatrick, Founder, Lab539

Steve Cobb, Field CISO, Zafran

Cocktail Reception w/ Live DJ (Exhibit Hall)

DAY 3— OCTOBER 7TH

Registration & Badge Pickup

Breakfast

VulnCheck Office Hours

Raj Badhwar, Chief Information Officer (CIO), SPA

Adam Powis, Senior Software Engineer, VulnCheck

Justin Timothy, Principal Threat Intelligence Consultant, Guidepoint Research and Intelligence Team (GRIT)

Exhibit Hours + CTF

Ethan Muntz, Strategic Threat Analyst, Health-ISAC

Tim Roberts, Head of Sales Engineering, VulnCheck

Thomas MacKenzie, Director of Product Strategy, Lansweeper

Patrick Garrity (moderator), Security Researcher, VulnCheck; Tod Beardsley, runZero; Shelby Cunningham, GitHub; Caitlin Condon, VulnCheck

Taha Siddiqi, Vulnerability Research Intern, TrendAI (lead presenter); Smile Thanapattheerakul, Manager, Research Incubation, TrendAI (co-presenter)

Josh Shomo, Senior Exploit Developer, VulnCheck

Joel Callicrate, Digital Janitorial Consultant, Cisco Talos

Lunch

Closing Remarks, CTF Winner Announcements

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THREATCON1
2026 AGENDA