Bringing new and exciting ideas to the forefront of the information security industry would not be possible with the wonderful speakers who work hard to research, discover, and teach their ideas with our attendees. We’re so excited to welcome the speakers below to BSides Delaware 2026!
2026 Speaker Bios
Nate Lager
Talk: Kill the Drift, Shrink the Attack Surface: Hardening Linux Hosts with bootc
Bio: Nate Lager, Principal Technical Marketing Manager, Red Hat
Nate has been using Linux since Red Hat 5.0. He has taken his passion for communities, technology, and open source from a hobby to a career over the past 20+ years. Evolving from hobbyist to system administrator, to Technical Account Manager, Nate is now a Pr. Technical Marketing Manager at Red Hat, and a content creator. From blogs, to live streams, to Podcasts, Nate has a passion for sharing his love of Linux and Technology.
Nate’s a nerd in his personal life too! TTRPGs like DnD, gaming, self-hosting, electronics projects, and even a DEFCON group (DC610) he helped found and still runs today.
When he’s not at the keyboard, he’s probably in the garage, or on the trails.
Socials
LinkedIN: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ironsysadmin
Mastodon @gangrif@undrground.org
Github: https://github.com/nlager
Awez Akhtar Khatik
Talk: RiskBridge: Turning CVEs into Business-Aligned Patch Priorities
Bio: Awez Akhtar Khatik is a cybersecurity professional focused on vulnerability management, cyber risk, cloud security, GRC, and digital trust. He has served as an ISACA Certified Cybersecurity Specialist subject matter expert, including formal exam question review and certification working group activities. He is also a coauthor of RiskBridge, an explainable, compliance-aware vulnerability prioritization framework.
Yelena Mujibur Sheikh
Talk: RiskBridge: Turning CVEs into Business-Aligned Patch Priorities
Anthony L. Marchetta
Talk: From Framework Overload to an Actionable Healthcare Cybersecurity Roadmap
Bio: Anthony Marchetta is scheduled to complete his M.S. in Cybersecurity, with a concentration in digital forensics, at DeSales University by BSides Delaware 2026. His graduate capstone developed a practical healthcare cybersecurity implementation model integrating NIST CSF, CIS Controls, and ISO/IEC 27001 through framework mapping, risk assessment, security architecture, and phased roadmap development. He also has professional experience in education, which informs his approach to making complex cybersecurity material clear, teachable, and actionable for real organizations.
Anthony J.
Talk: The Harness Frontier: Who Wins the Token Economy of Vulnerability Research?
Bio: Anthony J., Ph.D., is a cybersecurity director at a Fortune 30 company whose résumé spans three-letter agencies, classrooms, and enterprise security leadership. With roots in software exploitation, experience teaching cybersecurity at the NSA, and responsibility for enterprise AI/ML, he brings a hacker’s curiosity to security strategy. Find his latest experiments and ideas on X at @tech.
Mike B.
Talk: The Harness Frontier: Who Wins the Token Economy of Vulnerability Research?
Bio: Mike B., known online as @m8sec, is a red team lead focused on covert operations, adversary emulation, and AI security. His work explores emerging technologies, develops innovative tools, and pushes the boundaries of cybersecurity through hands-on research and experimentation.
Rick Ramirez
Talk: Cleartext at the Edge: A Neptune R900 Case Study in RF Telemetry Exposure
Bio: Rick Ramirez is a product security engineer focused on cyber-physical systems, OT/ICS security, and RF telemetry exposure. He has experience across product security, medical device security, manufacturing security, logistics security, and critical infrastructure risk assessment. Before moving into cybersecurity, Rick served as a U.S. Marine Corps radio/electronics technician, where he developed a foundation in RF communications, field electronics, and signal systems. His current research explores how overlooked wireless telemetry can expose privacy and security risks in smart infrastructure.
David Menichello
Talk: Top 10 Non-Technical Reasons Cyber Program Struggle
Bio: David Menichello
27 years in security and technology risk.
Led corporate security and consulting teams for companies like SunGard, FIS, Comcast, BTB Security, Netrix, and SideChannel.
Currently Founder/CEO at Carve Line, a boutique GRC consultancy.
Industries
FinTech, Health-tech, Insurance, Higher-Ed, Entertainment/Resorts, Gaming, SLED.
Ben Sleek
Talk: Building repro’s at WARP speed
Bio: I’m an ex-Developer turned Application Security Engineer currently employed by Proof. After 10 years of building applications, I discovered breaking them could be just as fun.
Phillip Wylie
Talk: Invisible Gateways: How Threat Actors Exploit IoT to Breach Organizations
Bio: Phillip Wylie is a globally recognized offensive security professional and Chief Security Evangelist at Suzu Labs. He co-authored The Pentester Blueprint, hosts The Phillip Wylie Show, Simply Offensive, and CYBR.HAK.CAST, and is a frequent speaker in the US and internationally.
Sasan Padidar
Talk: We Gave AI Agents 3,029 CVEs. Here’s What Happened—and What Defenders Can Do About It.
Bio: Sasan Padidar is the founder and CEO of Quantro Security, where he works on autonomous AI agents for cybersecurity. His work focuses on understanding how AI changes vulnerability exploitation, security validation, and remediation. Through research and work with enterprise security teams, he focuses on bridging the gap between discovering vulnerabilities and understanding which ones actually matter.
Amber Kirylak
Talk: Solving for Y: Secret formula for Solving Challenges in Cybersecurity
Bio: Amber Kirylak [HRTBRKRNR] is an Information Security Analyst in the financial sector. Her path into cybersecurity was anything but conventional.
For 11 years she worked in photography as a retoucher, photo assistant and photographer, so you may have seen her work without realizing it. When COVID hit in 2020, she stepped outside her comfort zone and enrolled in Harvard’s free CS50x and CS50P courses through OpenCourseWare. CS50 was the spark that ignited her interest in cybersecurity, and she never looked back.
Amber is an autodidact, with no university degree or formal training pipeline. She built her skills by chasing scholarships and free training, CTFs, asking a lot of questions, going down countless rabbit holes, and knocking on doors until the right ones opened. In 2022 she landed her first security role with two Harvard CS50 certificates and her ISC2 CC exam result still pending. Along the way she found mentors who helped her hone her skills and guided her through the journey. She firmly believes the only dumb question is the one you were too afraid to ask.
She was selected for the 2024–2025 WiCyS + SANS Security Training Scholarship, which pushed her technical growth further than she expected. Because the best defenders think like attackers, she works on both sides of the wire: diving into CTFs, documenting techniques, and sharing what she learns with the community.
Her talk, Solving for Y, is the problem-solving framework she wishes she’d had when she was breaking in.
Off the keyboard, you’ll find her playing D&D, board games and puzzles, or logging unreasonable hours in Night City. Her favorite villages are Lock Picking and Physical Security Village.
Website: HRTBRKRNR.com
Brian Martin
Talk: Integrating AI Into Your Infosec Workflows
Bio: Brian Martin BS, CISA, CISSP, CCSP, HCISSP, CHFI, CHS3, TOGAF9, ITIL4, ex-QSA is a technology curmudgeon. He works for and is the owner of Liticode providing security advisory services and AI workflow integration consulting. He enjoys working with clients to optimize technology outcomes. He has worked in every vertical, held clearances, and began his career as a communications programmer for the USAF. Liticode provides an internship program that has turned out some exceptional individuals now working at F500 companies. He loves talking about ways to make technology perform tricks.
Viktor Khudiaiev
Talk: If Someone Changes Your Database, Should Your System Still Execute the Payment?
Bio: Viktor Khudiaiev is a software engineer with over thirteen years building payment platforms, enterprise systems and banking infrastructure, currently working on backend systems in enterprise banking in Wilmington, Delaware. He has worked on transaction processing, secure integrations, cloud-native services and production reliability, and has spent a large part of his career on the parts of systems that only matter when something goes wrong. He is the author of “Verifiable Record Integrity Without a Blockchain” and maintains a public reference implementation of the approach described in it. His interest in record integrity started in 2014, when he built a token-based integrity module for a payment platform after noticing that nothing in the system could demonstrate a stored transaction had not been altered. This is his first conference talk.
Robin Noyes
Talk: Backdoors & Breaches: Where the Ammo Is Fake but the Learning Is Real
Bio: Robin Noyes is a cybersecurity leader with over twenty years of experience across the telecommunications and government sectors, including six years of military service. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from the University of Maryland University College, a Master of Science in Management Information Science with a concentration in Information Assurance from Nova Southeastern University, and a Master of Science in Information Security Engineering from the SANS Institute, along with numerous GIAC, Splunk, and industry certifications.
Her career spans application operations, systems administration, Splunk engineering and content development, incident response, threat hunting, cybersecurity analysis, and digital forensics.
Steven Williams
Talk: Automated Detection & Response with AI
Bio: Steven is a Security Engineer at GoodRx. He has previous experience doing threat hunting, security analysis, and detection engineering for the military and private companies.
Sheshananda Reddy Kandula
Talk: Install Once, Exploit Forever: The MCP Plugin Supply Chain Attack Surface
Bio: With 16 years of experience in application security across web, mobile, and API ecosystems, I focus on finding real-world vulnerabilities and building practical defenses across the SDLC. I hold OSWE, OSCP, and CISSP certifications and have worked on large-scale security programs in global organizations. I have presented and delivered training at security conferences and community events, including HOPE, BSides Delaware, OWASP Boston Chapter, and other industry venues, covering topics such as application security, mobile security, and post-quantum risks in modern applications.
Jim Gilsinn
Talk: Do you know what is hOT right now?
Bio: Jim Gilsinn is a Principal ICS Cybersecurity Engineer at MITRE with a Master of Science in Electrical Engineering. He has over 30 years engineering experience and nearly 25 years ICS/OT cybersecurity experience developing, designing, implementing, and assessing secure and reliable systems. At MITRE, he is assisting rural and municipal utilities increase their cybersecurity posture and is helping to lead a project on OT asset management.
Prior to MITRE, Jim was a consultant for 12 years at Dragos and Kenexis where he assisted industrial customers assess their network architecture, standards conformance, and organizational maturity, as well as developing security policies and procedures. He has worked in a variety of industrial environments, including oil & gas, petrochemical, utilities, manufacturing, and nuclear. Jim started his career as an electrical engineer in the NIST Engineering Lab working on robotics, sensors, and cybersecurity.
Jim has been a member of the ISA99 committee developing the ISA/IEC 62443 standard series since its inception in 2002 and was the committee co-chair from 2012-2022. Jim has also contributed to the NIST Cybersecurity Framework (CSF) and NIST SP800-82.
Supporting the broader security community, Jim is also an adjunct professor at GMU teaching Critical Infrastructure Protection and ICS Security.
