No Hype, Just Hacks: AI That Actually Delivers in Security

Aaron is the Co-Founder and Chief Threat Research Officer at Abstract Security, where he focuses on reducing security alert fatigue and improving signal-to-noise in modern SOC environments. His background includes leadership roles in threat research, telemetry analysis, and SIEM pipeline optimization. Before Abstract, Aaron held senior roles at Anomali, SecureWorks, and Palo Alto Networks, helping organizations operationalize cloud and SaaS telemetry within tools like Splunk and Elastic.On LinkedIn, Aaron shares a deep focus on driving faster detection and response by helping security teams route the right data in the right way. At Abstract, he leads the development of detection logic and partners closely with security engineering teams to translate real-world needs into AI-powered detection outcomes. His hands-on expertise with cloud-native data pipelines and modern SecOps makes him a strong advocate for how AI can reshape threat detection at scale.

With 20 years securing everything from Fortune 100 banks to R1 research labs, Jon Zeolla is a self-proclaimed AI Janitor, working at the intersection of AI and cloud-native security and compliance. He’s a SANS Certified Instructor, CNCF Ambassador, and open source developer and advocate, contributing to over 30 projects in the past year and earning him the Start-Up Innovator of the Year award in 2021. Jon is also a frequent speaker at events such as SANS CloudSecNext, KubeCon, and Cloud Native Security Con.

Today, Jon is the founder and CEO of Zenable, where he is building a conformance-based AI coding platform that puts guardrails around AI agents, ensuring that they adhere to company policies while still eliminating corporate toil and manual processes.

Peyton has spent 10+ years in cyber security with an emphasis in Red Team, Incident Response, and Threat Intelligence. He was a member of CrowdStrike Services from 2018 - 2023 where he split time between Incident Response and Red Team. He was a first responder to many nation state and e-crime cyber intrusions, and also performed red team exercises across a range of industry verticals breaching 20+ Fortune 1000 organizations.

Today, Peyton is the founder and CEO of Specular where he's focused on building AI agents to augment the identification, assessment, and remediation of cyber security vulnerabilities and misconfigurations.

Vyas Sekar is the Tan Family Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering in the ECE Department at Carnegie Mellon University. He co-directs the Future of Enterprise Security Initiative at CMU Cylab. He also serves as the Chief Scientist at Conviva, and as a cofounder at Rockfish Data. His work has been recognized with numerous awards including the SIGCOMM Rising Star Award, SIGCOMM Test of Time Award, the NSA Science of Security prize, the NSF CAREER award, the Internet Research Task Force Applied Networking Research Award, the Intel Outstanding Researcher Award, and the IIT Madras Young Alumni Achiever Award. He received his B.Tech from IIT Madras where he was awarded the President of India Gold Medal and a PhD from Carnegie Mellon University.

Aqsa Taylor is the Senior Director of Product Marketing at Abstract Security. She is a published author of the book “Process Mining: The Security Angle” and has extensive Product Management experience, having built some of the industry's most well-known cybersecurity platforms, such as Twistlock (acquired by Palo Alto Networks), Prisma Cloud Workload Security by Palo Alto Networks, and Gutsy (the industry's first AI-driven process mining platform). Throughout her career, Aqsa has actively engaged with and consulted CISOs and information security leaders from both public and private sectors, including more than 45% of Fortune 100 organizations, on best cloud security practices.

She is also known for her cybersecurity evangelism, speaking at conferences, podcasts, and webinars about industry trends and security best practices. Her technical articles have been recognized by global magazines and media outlets such as Dark Reading, Security Boulevard, Unite.ai and others. Aqsa's passion for cybersecurity began during her research for her Master's degree, where she authored the research paper 'Securing Cloud Containers Using Quantum Networking Channels' (IEEE publication).  

When she's not geeking out on technology, Aqsa enjoys writing poetry and going on long drives to explore new places.

Madison Oliver is a Pittsburgh-native, vulnerability transparency advocate, and senior security manager at GitHub, leading the advisory database team. She is passionate about vulnerability reporting, response, and disclosure, and participates in related Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF) working groups and serves on the CVE Program Board. Her views are enriched by her prior experience as a product incident response analyst at GitHub and as a vulnerability coordinator at the CERT Coordination Center at the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). She enjoys engaging with students and is a former undergraduate cybersecurity adjunct professor at Duquesne University and serves on the Pennsylvania State University (PSU) College of Information Sciences and Technology alumni board. She earned an M.S. in Information Security Policy and Management from CMU, and a B.S. in Security and Risk Analysis from PSU.

Mike Gualtieri is a seasoned technical engineering leader with over 20 years of experience in cybersecurity, software engineering, and cloud-native infrastructure. He currently leads Security Engineering at Netlify, having previously built and led the Security & Compliance program at the high-growth startup Gatsby, guiding it through its acquisition by Netlify. Throughout his career, Mike has founded three tech companies; as a consultant, he has launched dozens of successful software products for clients, advised organizations on building security programs, and developed cybersecurity curriculum in penetration testing and red teaming for the University of Pittsburgh.At Netlify, Mike has gained unique insight into the emerging AI software ecosystem, where over seven million developers trust the platform for fast, scalable, and secure software deployments — for AI-driven workflows and beyond.