Cyber Resilience Awareness Day Virtual Summit 2026

Sign up for this talk here, or for ALL sessions of the ISSA International Cyber Resilience Awareness Day Virtual Summit here: https://issa.brighttalk.com/summit/8195/

Cyber resilience has moved from aspiration to mandate, tested on two fronts at once: it must hold up against AI-enabled adversaries that never sleep, and be measured with a rigor regulators and boards increasingly demand. Cyber Resilience Awareness Day 2026 convenes practitioners, researchers, and standards bodies to answer one question: how ready are we, really, across readiness assessment, recovery strategies, and roadmap design.

The day opens with the state of the art in measurement: an AI extension to the CR-CMM maturity model that turns AI resilience claims into evidence, alongside independent research showing that most organizations confuse designed maturity with the continuously degrading readiness they actually possess. A fireside conversation with NIST previews proposed control updates for data vaulting and isolated recovery, reframing practice around minimum viable operations and impact tolerance.

For recovery, sessions introduce an ISSA-produced framework for safely restarting critical services after an incident; sequencing identity, security, and infrastructure layers rather than restoring by urgency alongside secure-by-design threat modeling, AI-integrated vulnerability governance, and quantifiable remediation metrics that turn architecture into resilience indicators.

Resilience is no longer a checkbox, but a number tracked continuously from assessment to the next AI-era exam.

Featuring:
Francesco Chiarini, Chairman ISSA Cyber Resilience SIG and VP CISO in Residence, Rubrik (https://issa.org/speaker/francesco-chiarini/) (https://www.linkedin.com/in/chiarini/)
Calin Gheorghiu, Co-Chairman ISSA Cyber Resilience SIG and Chief Resilience Architect, Fenix24 (https://issa.org/speaker/calin-gheorghiu/) (https://www.linkedin.com/in/calin-gheorghiu-81657313a/)

Sign up for this talk here, or for ALL sessions of the ISSA International Cyber Resilience Awareness Day Virtual Summit here: https://issa.brighttalk.com/summit/8195/

Cyber resilience exists because prevention fails. It assumes things will break and asks how much you can lose and still deliver.

That discipline was built on assumptions which stayed comfortably theoretical for twenty years. AI puts weight on all of them at once. The failing component is load-bearing, it makes its own decisions, and there is now something on the attacker's side that never sleeps. Worse, when it goes wrong you often cannot tell a defect from an attack, and you may never find out. Twenty years of theory, now sitting the exam.

This session introduces the AI Resilience Extension to CR-CMM, the Cyber Resilience Capability Maturity Model, which turns resilience claims about AI into questions an auditor can ask and evidence an organisation can produce.

Featuring:
Lukasz Guzdziol, AI Resilience Lead, CR-CMM, ISSA Cyber Resilience SIG (https://issa.org/speaker/lukasz-guzdziol/) (www.linkedin.com/in/lukasz-guzdziol-cissp-cisa-ccsk-511babb)
Surendra Narang, Senior Manager of Enterprise Security, Palo Alto Networks (https://issa.org/speaker/surendra-narang/) (https://www.linkedin.com/in/surendra-narang-54a43b3b/)
Jim Reavis, CEO, Cloud Security Alliance (https://issa.org/speaker/jim-reavis-2/) (https://www.linkedin.com/in/jimreavis/)

Sign up for this talk here, or for ALL sessions of the ISSA International Cyber Resilience Awareness Day Virtual Summit here: https://issa.brighttalk.com/summit/8195/

When a major cyberattack is contained, the hardest phase often begins after the headlines fade: deciding what to turn back on, in what order, and under whose authority. Most organizations default to ad hoc, urgency-driven recovery, racing to restore whatever the business is loudest about - which reintroduces risk faster than it restores confidence.

This session presents the Critical IT Services Restart Framework, a structured, four-phase model (Assess, Remediate, Assure, Reconnect) for governing the transition from incident containment to safe business-as-usual operations. Rather than treating recovery as a single event, the framework sequences restoration through dependency-driven layers - starting with identity and access management, then security perimeter controls, then infrastructure and network services - each gated by explicit minimum activation criteria and formal executive sign-off.

Attendees will learn:
* Why "technical restoration" and "operational trust" are not the same thing, and why conflating them creates reinfection risk
* How to build a dependency-driven restart sequence instead of a business-urgency-driven one
* What minimum viable conditions (security, staffing, monitoring) should gate every service reactivation
* How to structure governance and sign-off authority so no layer advances without verified integrity
* Practical lessons on compensating controls and degraded operating modes that keep the business running safely mid-recovery

Featuring:
Shwetha Babu Prasad, Senior Information Security and Data Protection Specialist (https://issa.org/speaker/shwetha-prasad/) (www.linkedin.com/in/shweprasad)
Saket Varma Namburi, Senior Cybersecurity Engineer, MGT Impact Solutions (https://issa.org/speaker/saketh-varma-namburi/) (https://www.linkedin.com/in/nsakethvarma/)

Sign up for this talk here, or for ALL sessions of the ISSA International Cyber Resilience Awareness Day Virtual Summit here: https://issa.brighttalk.com/summit/8195/

Walks through 10 questions to define an organisation's true minimum viable operation - what must be documented, defended, recovered, tested and monitored regardless of how much of normal operations remain. Provides metrics for each and alignment to leading resilience frameworks and maturity models.

Featuring:
Carlos Recalde, Founder & Chief Resilience Advocate, Resilience - by Design (Moderator) ( https://issa.org/speaker/carlos-recalde/) (https://www.linkedin.com/in/crecalde/)
Calin Gheorghiu, Chief Architect, Resilience, Fenix24 (https://issa.org/speaker/calin-gheorghiu/) (https://www.linkedin.com/in/calintech/)
Alex Sharpe, Board Member, Practitioner, Consultant, Speaker, Author, Interim Executive, Sharpe 42 LLC (https://issa.org/speaker/alex-sharpe/) (https://www.linkedin.com/in/alex-sharpe-3rd/)
Dan Tinsley, Global Director of Cyber Resilience, DTN Advisory (https://issa.org/speaker/dan-tinsley/) (https://www.linkedin.com/in/dantinsley/)

Sign up for this talk here, or for ALL sessions of the ISSA International Cyber Resilience Awareness Day Virtual Summit here: https://issa.brighttalk.com/summit/8195/

Cyber resilience is certainly supported by IT resilience. But it is not a pure IT issue. NIS2 recognizes this dependency in their requirements and thus establishes that all companies subject to NIS2 must conduct an All-Hazards Risk Analysis to identify all possible risks, including both IT and non-IT risks. While this Risk Analysis strategy looks fine at first glance to effectively measure the existing risks and face them effectively, it faces several challenges when deployed. This keynote will show the results of ECSO’s initiative in Risk Analysis to conduct an All-hazards, pan European Risk Analysis exercise, that showed the limitations of this strategy for an applicable, effective cyber resilience strategy for a multinational company.

Featuring:
Mariano Benito Gomez, Cybersecurity and Privacy Ambassador, GMV (https://www.linkedin.com/in/marianojbenito/)

Sign up for this talk here, or for ALL sessions of the ISSA International Cyber Resilience Awareness Day Virtual Summit here: https://issa.brighttalk.com/summit/8195/

Enterprise organizations face a widening gap between security policy and measurable resilience outcomes. This session presents a practitioner framework for operationalizing secure-by-design principles at scale — covering AI-integrated vulnerability triage, pre-build threat modeling enforcement, and AI agent risk governance. Drawing on real-world deployment across commercial systems supporting 42 million U.S. workers, the session demonstrates how quantifiable metrics (remediation backlog reduction, time-to-remediate improvement) translate security architecture decisions into resilience readiness indicators. Attendees will see how NIST, CSA, and AIUC-1 frameworks anchor the measurement approach and how the same methodology applies across organizations of varying maturity.

Featuring:
Sanat Pattanaik, Principal Security Architect, ADP (https://www.linkedin.com/in/sanatpt/) (https://issa.org/speaker/sanat-pattanaik/)

Sign up for this talk here, or for ALL sessions of the ISSA International Cyber Resilience Awareness Day Virtual Summit here: https://issa.brighttalk.com/summit/8195/

Most organizations assess cyber resilience by confirming and documenting what controls exist and how mature the processes around them are. Maturity frameworks, compliance audits, and risk registers all answer the same question: what did we design? None answer the question that matters when a threat arrives: is it working right now?

Controls degrade between assessments. Patches slip. People make rational trade-offs under pressure. The result is control drift, a growing gap between the resilience posture an organization believes it has and the one that actually exists, oftentimes a gap that is invisible to point-in-time assessments and maturity scores.

This talk examines why the gap exists, why conventional measurement misses it, and what to do instead: decomposing controls into measurable mechanisms — detection reliability, response timeliness, resistance strength — and replacing assumptions with rolling measurement from telemetry you already have. It shows how the same control configuration produces dramatically different risk outcomes in different operational contexts, how continuous control measurement can feed quantified risk analysis when decisions demand it, and why resilience is something you measure continuously and not something you declare by checkbox.

Featuring:
Laura Voicu, Co-Founder & CDSO, Enterprise Risk Quantification Institute (ERQI) (https://www.linkedin.com/in/voiculaura/) (https://issa.org/speaker/laura-voicu/)

Sign up for this talk here, or for ALL sessions of the ISSA International Cyber Resilience Awareness Day Virtual Summit here: https://issa.brighttalk.com/summit/8195/

Understanding the current state of cyber resilience is essential for guiding decision-makers and helping organisations improve their resilience. Cyber-attacks are growing more sophisticated, driven by advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence, rising cyber warfare activity, and increasing global connectivity. In 2024, legislation such as the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) and the European Cyber Resilience Act was enacted to embed cyber resilience into organisational operations.

It is essential to understand cyber resilience, how organisations can measure it, and how to address the most common pitfalls. This research answers two questions: What is the current state of cyber resilience across a sample of organisations? And can a codified method be established to address the most common challenges affecting effective cyber resilience?

The study surveyed 46 global partners and organisational leaders, ranging from management to C-suite, to explore their organisations' cyber resilience postures—assessing readiness across three phases: resistance, response, and recovery—while recognising that attempted breaches are nearly inevitable and represent a constant risk.

Four key impediments were identified:
*Limited reporting practices
*Difficulty building a resilient organisational culture
*Insufficient collaboration
*Lack of planning for compromise

These barriers—spanning internal and external challenges—hinder organisations' ability to anticipate, withstand, and recover from cyber threats, underscoring the complexity of building cohesive defences across diverse environments.

Featuring:
Adam D'Arcy, Lead, Infrastructure Security, Klaviyo (https://www.linkedin.com/in/adamedarcy/) (https://issa.org/speaker/adam-darcy/)

Cyber resilience has moved from concept to mandate - but engineering it into real systems remains the hard part. In this fireside chat, ISSA Cyber Resilience SIG Chairman Francesco Chiarini sits down with Ron Ross and Vicky Pillitteri, co-authors of NIST SP 800-160 Vol. 2 and SP 800-172, to unpack how organizations can move from resilience theory to operational practice. The conversation will cover selecting and applying resilience engineering principles, protecting critical assets in an AI-driven threat landscape, and defining the minimum viable operations organizations must protect within their impact tolerance - plus an exclusive look at two new control updates proposed to NIST SP 800-53 on data vaulting and isolated recovery, submitted jointly by the ISSA Cyber Resilience SIG Task Force and NIST.

Key Themes:
* Applying cyber resilience engineering: translating NIST SP 800-160 Vol. 2 into practical controls that hold up against real disruption.
* Protecting critical assets in the AI era: treating AI/ML models, pipelines, and data as first-class assets.
* Minimum viable operations: identifying functions to keep running during an attack, aligned to impact tolerance.
* NIST SP 800-53's future: a preview of proposed controls on data vaulting and isolated recovery.

Featuring:
Francesco Chiarini, Chairman, ISSA Cyber Resilience SIG and VP CISO in Residence, Rubrik (Moderator) (https://issa.org/speaker/francesco-chiarini/) (https://www.linkedin.com/in/chiarini/)
Victoria Pillitteri, Manager, Security Engineering & Risk Management Group, NIST (https://issa.org/speaker/victoria-pillitteri/) (https://www.linkedin.com/in/victoriayanpillitteri/)
Ron Ross, CEO, RONROSSECURE, LLC (https://issa.org/speaker/ron-ross/) (https://www.linkedin.com/in/ronrossecure/)

Sign up for this talk here, or for ALL sessions of the ISSA International Cyber Resilience Awareness Day Virtual Summit here: https://issa.brighttalk.com/summit/8195/

Florence Nightingale's charts showed British officials that disease was killing more of their soldiers in the Crimean War than combat was. Once the question shifted from what felt most dangerous to what did the most harm, reforms followed. Resilience ratings face the same pull today. Ask how resilient an organization is, and you often get an answer to an easier question: how bad would our worst day feel? Daniel Kahneman called this substitution. It tends to surface wherever readiness gets rated quickly, in tabletop debriefs, heatmaps, and board scorecards.

This session shows a fix that costs nothing but a little discipline: splitting every resilience question into two separate estimates before anyone reaches for a word like "critical." How often could this happen, and how much would it hurt if it did? Both go down on paper, as ranges. It's the move Nightingale made, and attendees leave with a structure simple enough to use in their next readiness review.

Featuring:
Tony Martin-Vegue, Founder and Principal, 95 Risk Advisory (https://issa.org/speaker/tony-martin-vegue/) (https://www.linkedin.com/in/tonymartinvegue/)

Sign up for this talk here, or for ALL sessions of the ISSA International Cyber Resilience Awareness Day Virtual Summit here: https://issa.brighttalk.com/summit/8195/

Organizations rushing to quantify cyber resilience often look first at tools and technical controls. But what actually predicts readiness? This session shares findings from original doctoral research with 12 C-suite technology leaders who have integrated generative AI into their cybersecurity programs. Five themes emerged — risk management, AI governance, human-AI collaboration, resource amplification, and vendor oversight — revealing that measurable resilience outcomes depend less on technology sophistication and more on human expertise orchestration. Attendees will leave with a practical framework for evaluating GAI-cybersecurity readiness across people, processes, and technology, grounded in real practitioner data.

Featuring:
Jessica Parker, President, Wise Bites LLC (https://issa.org/speaker/jessica-parker/) (https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessica-parker-pmp/)

Sign up for this talk here, or for ALL sessions of the ISSA International Cyber Resilience Awareness Day Virtual Summit here: https://issa.brighttalk.com/summit/8195/

A three-layer model for measuring readiness by comparing what leaders believe, what systems actually do, and what the organisation can govern. Derived from field assessments across MSPs, VARs and mid-market environments, surfacing architectural dependencies, recovery gaps and governance blind spots, with CR-CMM alignment for consistent benchmarking.

Featuring:
Jeff McCue, Resilience Architect, ProofPackets® (https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeff-mccue/) (https://issa.org/speaker/jeff-mccue/)
Travis Chambers, Information Technology Consultant (https://www.linkedin.com/in/tschambers/) (https://issa.org/speaker/travis-chambers/)

Sign up for this talk here, or for ALL sessions of the ISSA International Cyber Resilience Awareness Day Virtual Summit here: https://issa.brighttalk.com/summit/8195/

As cyber threats grow more sophisticated, European large enterprises face unique structural challenges. This presentation examines the current threat landscape, analyzing recent major incidents and shifting investment priorities. We explore how organizations navigate complex EU regulatory frameworks and the push for digital sovereignty while adapting their organizational models. Finally, the session addresses the critical cybersecurity skills gap and strategies for building resilient internal capabilities. Attendees will gain actionable insights into how Europe’s largest corporations balance regulatory compliance with robust, proactive defense strategies in an increasingly volatile digital ecosystem.

Featuring:
Nicola Ciani, Researcher, European Digital Tech Watch (https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicolaciani/) (https://issa.org/speaker/nicola-ciani/)
Giorgia Dragoni, Direttice Osservatorio Digital & Sustainable, Osservatori Digital Innovation (https://www.linkedin.com/in/giorgia-dragoni-b5428551/) (https://issa.org/speaker/giorgia-dragoni/)

Sign up for this talk here, or for ALL sessions of the ISSA International Cyber Resilience Awareness Day Virtual Summit here: https://issa.brighttalk.com/summit/8195/

AI resilience is the ability to sustain critical services when AI is unavailable, unreliable, compromised, or acting beyond its intended authority. Drawing on lessons from GRF’s AI disruption and Agentic Attack exercises, this session will examine practical measures of readiness, including dependency visibility, degraded operations, recovery criteria, agent controls, and vendor coordination. It will show why cyber resilience must be tested collectively, and why organizations should exercise with their critical vendors and suppliers before an incident.

Featuring:
Mark Orsi, CEO, Global Resilience Federation (https://www.linkedin.com/in/markorsi/) (https://issa.org/speaker/mark-orsi/)

Session topic and description to be announced.