TONY TURNER (KEYNOTE)
Tony is a seasoned cybersecurity executive, focused on addressing issues in critical infrastructure, security engineering and disrupting the way we think about security solutions.
- VP Product @ Frenos
- SANS Author and Instructor
- Security Architect to Critical Infrastructure
SOURCE: LEAKED_CAM_53
Anthony Pillitiere
Father, Husband, Gen-X Techer, Veteran Advocate and Hacker. Co-Founder Horizon3.ai, Retired United States Air Force, Former Deputy CTO leveraging a breadth of experient and technical expertise to implement stack spanning architectures revolutionizing and automating special OPS, COMMS, Builds, Deployments and monitoring at global scale.
He has a passion to help drive transformation and spark a culture of innovation in others by learning, sharing knowledge and the insight that comes with experience with those around him.
SOURCE: LEAKED_CAM_22
Aidan Holland
Is a Senior Cybersecurity Researcher and Software Engineer at Censys, where he specializes in threat intelligence and internet-wide security research. His work focuses on identifying and analyzing malicious infrastructure, tracking threat actors, and developing tools for security analysis at scale.
Aidan is an active contributor to the open source security community, building and maintaining tools for threat hunting, data analysis, and security automation.
SOURCE: LEAKED_CAM_24
Jeff Man
(Expert in AI) (e.g. Actual Intelligence)
With over 40 years of experience in the trenches working in all aspects of computer, network, and information security, including cryptography, risk management, vulnerability analysis, compliance assessment, forensic analysis and penetration testing. Certified National Security Agency Cryptanalyst. Designed and fielded the first software-based cryptosystem ever produced by NSA. Inventor of the “whiz” wheel, a cryptologic cipher wheel used by US Special Forces for over a decade. Honorary lifetime member of the Special Forces Association. Previously held security research, management and product development roles with the National Security Agency, the DoD and private-sector enterprises. Pioneering member of the first penetration testing “red team” at NSA.
SOURCE: LEAKED_CAM_17
Perry Carpenter
Chief Human Risk Mangement Strategist @ KnowBe4
Perry is a multi-award-winning author, podcaster, and speaker with a lifelong fascination for both deception and technology. As a cybersecurity professional, human factors expert, and deception researcher, Perry has spent over two decades at the forefront of exploring how cybercriminals exploit human behavior.
SOURCE: LEAKED_CAM_41
Kadi McKean
Improving [Dev|Sec]Ops since her days in COBOL development and Mainframe solutions
She is currently focused on collaborating with developers, security researchers to help prioritize Open Source, 3rd party, and technical debt causes of potential risk areas which result in fewer attacker options.
SOURCE: LEAKED_CAM_25
Chris Williams
Chris is part of the HackNWA crew with a fascinating background. He grew up in New Jersery, he learned to code in assembler at 7yrs old and was writing and optimizing video games for his siblings. Later in life he held multiple director level roles such as Director of Network Operations at Interop Technologies, then CTO of Bernett Research before returning to more hands on keyboard roles before getting into the CTF circuit and writing his own shell code on the fly. Currently in the top 50 rankings on the National Cyber League, he has pwnd many a CTFs and is a top hacker
SOURCE: LEAKED_CAM_26
Jimi Allee
Jimi2x over 25 years in the Information Security industry, Jimi has successfully navigated through many roles within the Infosec landscape, including Network/System/Security Engineering, Threat Intel/Risk Analysis, Offensive Security, Red/Blue/Purple Teaming as well as Research & Development. A former member of the US National Video Game Team, Jimi's passionate curiosity brings a gamer mentality to the world of Threat Research, Detection and Elimination.
SOURCE: LEAKED_CAM_31
Fred Lawler
Software Developer on Linux Kernel @ Cloudflare; versatile developer who contributes to open source, builds applications, contributes to an operating system, mentors, and sometimes speaks. Enjoys refactoring, simplifying systems, learning and tackling technical problems.
SOURCE: LEAKED_CAM_21
Sara Alfadil
Sr. Software Engineer @ McGraw Hill; HackNWA crew member who has participated with us and contributes to the win for over a decade in hacking tournaments and other events. Software Engineer and ethical hacker by trade; specializing in Game Development, Distributed Systems, Web App Security and Cloud Infrastructure.
SOURCE: LEAKED_CAM_8
James Honeycutt
Jay is a Threat Hunter for a retail organization with 30 years of combined experience across military and commercial cybersecurity operations. After serving 28 years in the U.S. Army as a Cyber Warfare Technician, he now focus on identifying security gaps and closing them through custom tooling, automation, and deep analysis.
SOURCE: LEAKED_CAM_43
Mike Debreceni
1337 Hacker; Protocol Wizard, Human ADC
SOURCE: LEAKED_CAM_43
Ryan Davendorf
Ryan Devendorf is a Staff Sales Engineer at Abnormal Security with nearly 12 years of experience across incident response and security engineering, spanning SIEM, EDR, NDR, and email security. A veteran of the Black Hat SOC in both Las Vegas and London, Ryan has a practitioner's instinct for how attackers actually operate with more than a few stories to tell.
Driven by a passion for threat research, Ryan regularly uncovers and analyzes sophisticated attacks targeting global enterprises. His recent work includes discovering a novel phishing-as-a-service operation, exposing an international fraud scheme targeting tens of thousands of organizations, and helping Fortune 500 customers defend against nation-state–backed deepfake impersonation campaigns.
SOURCE: LEAKED_CAM_49
Andrew Herd
Andrew is a Senior Offensive Security Engineer - Red Team @ Humana. Graduating with a degree in Mathematics because the sentiment that math is the language of nature. Everything seems to be in patterns and he chose to study in Mathematics to better understand the world around us. Gravitating towards programming as a career because of a love for puzzles - all puzzles can be broken down into a pattern, and tweaking those patterns to achieve the optimal result brings joy.
SOURCE: LEAKED_CAM_61
Danil Karandin
Distinguished Engineer - Attack Path Analysis & Exposure Management @ Verizon, ACP Mentor, Veteran and Former Walmart SOC, Gartner Purple Team
SOURCE: LEAKED_CAM_1337
Shannon Franklin
Shannon has been party of the HackNWA crew for a long time and the creator of our ASMb1337 coding challenges. He was trained in the ways of the low level for his first career, coding OSD overlays and remote control systems in the Arkansas Delta when companies such as Sanyo and others were manufacturing TVs and electronics in state. He continues hardware hacking and the low level experience by coding video games, demo scenes and other interesting things for the 6502 and beyond.
sponsors
Contributing greatly to the overall experience
Operations Log / Schedule
Registration
Doors open and Registration begins
Welcome info
Conference intro and terminology explanation
Compelling personas keeping the victim in play
@Perry Carpenter - Weaponized nation state craft techniques leveraging AI and strong ops the likes of which every-day people stand no chance against. Perpetrated by highly organized eminence front including well-staffed with HR personel and throngs of enslaved indentured victims forced into perpetrating Just In Time Delivery of scams and fraudulent contrivances resulting in the subsequent victimization of even more people.
Making a rumble pack controller for Atari using discrete logic IC components and an SDK
@Shannon decided after last year's HackNWA he was going to make a rumble pack controller using discrete logic ICs. He having accomplished and manifested his designs began fabricating his custom PCBs, having gone through a few iterations on the design. Along the way he also created the accompanying SDK for developers to be able to utilize the functionality.
Placeholder
@Kadi McKeen Placeholder
SSTV Primer
@Mike put us onto SSTV last year when he was working on an SSTV parser and we were on its face compelled into utilizing SSTV at the conference. He will convey what SSTV is and how you can tune to our Channels to participate in more activities and challenges.
Hunting Smarter, Not Harder: Building Threat Hunting Pipelines with Python (featuring ESXi Hunting)
@James Honeycutt Virtualization platforms remain one of the least monitored layers in modern enterprise environments, making VMware ESXi a high‑value target for advanced adversaries. In this talk, Hunting Smarter, Not Harder, we explore how attackers abuse ESXi hypervisors through malicious VIBs, covert persistence mechanisms, and hidden virtual machines—often without triggering traditional EDR or NDR controls.
Attendees will be guided through a practical, Python‑driven threat‑hunting pipeline designed specifically for ESXi. The session covers targeted telemetry collection, data normalization, and the use of machine‑learning autoencoders to distinguish normal hypervisor behavior from anomalies. By training models on known‑clean ESXi artifacts, defenders can rapidly surface suspicious logs and components that warrant deeper investigation.
This presentation is geared toward detection engineers, threat hunters, and security practitioners looking to close visibility gaps in virtualized environments and move from reactive monitoring to proactive, repeatable hypervisor hunting.
Securing CI/CD Workflows for Game Studios
@Sara Alfadil - Placeholder
Lunch + Panel of PWN
@Anthony @Erdosneuman @Danil Karandin @Tanner Shin
Moderated by @Jimi2x
Lunch is being provided by Horizon3.ai so please gather food and then proceed to a table and prepare to hear from industry experts as they extoll wisdom and knowledge in this question and answer session. The audience will also have a chance to ask questions of the panel.
Scamopolis tools of the trade
@Jeff Man - Placehold
So you wanna load and execute a binary into Linux itself?
@Fred Lawler Programming languages today have exhaustive implementations and libraries are in abundance. For most use cases, the operating system does a great job at loading and executing binaries. But what happens when you want to execute code in a truly "hostile" environment—like a running kernel—and you want to bring your own environment with you?
This talk explores the technical hurdles of manual binary loading, specifically focused on the challenge of linking custom libc bindings into the Linux kernel. We’ll dive into the mechanics of binary formats and the low-level "hacks" required to execute code where it wasn't meant to go. We’ll walk through the process of defeating KASLR, navigating the minefield of kernel stack alignment, and managing the inevitable race conditions that arise when you bypass standard execution paths for the sake of experimentation.
Through the practitioners lens
@Ryan Pulling back the curtain on three active threats: Venom, a phishing-as-a-service platform that bypasses and hijacks MFA; the growing abuse of legitimate remote access tools inside healthcare environments; and a fraud group behind over $9 million in losses, unpacking the tactics and trust-based exploits that made it all possible.
Placeholder
@Chris Williams - Placeholder
In the Depths of Scambay
@Aidan Holland - Placehold
Keynote Speech
@Tony Turner