CruiseCon Privacy & AI
October 3 โ€“ 8, 2026
Departing from Port of Galveston

CruiseCon Privacy & AI

Mariner Of The Seas

October 3 โ€“ 8, 2026, Departing from Port of Galveston

If you prefer a balcony cabin or have other requests, please contact us at contact@cruisecon.com to see what we can arrange for you. Pricing varies depending upon availability.

Dead in the Water

What ! Terrorism Taught Me About the Threats You're Actually Facing

Dexter Ingram spent thirty years hunting terroristsโ€”from a forward operating base in Afghanistanโ€™s Helmand Province to the corridors of INTERPOL headquarters in Lyon to back-channel negotiations with governments that didnโ€™t always want to cooperate. What he kept running into, especially toward the end of his career, was how much the threat had changedโ€”and how much it had started to look like a cybersecurity problem. The same encrypted platforms your security team monitors. The same social engineering tactics your awareness training covers. The same human vulnerabilities your insider threat program tries to catch. Extremist organizations figured out the digital environment faster than most people in government were willing to admit, and the consequences of that lag are still playing out. In this talk, Ingram pulls from his time running the State Departmentโ€™s Office of Countering Violent Extremism, directing the 89-nation coalition to defeat ISIS, and coordinating counterterrorism responses from INTERPOL to walk through what the national security world learnedโ€”sometimes the hard wayโ€”about adversaries who adapt, disappear, and rebuild faster than any bureaucracy can track them. Heโ€™ll get into what AI-driven radicalization actually looks like in practice, why the timelines are compressing in ways that should concern anyone managing organizational risk, and what thirty years of coalition-building taught him about the difference between having intelligence and knowing what to do with it. No classified information he canโ€™t shareโ€”just hard-won perspective from someone who spent three decades in the rooms where these decisions get made and watched the threat follow us all online.

WHEN

October 4, 2026
07:00 AM

SPEAKER

Peter B. Kosmala

Dexter Ingram

Former Deputy Director for WMD Terrorism, US Department of State

Join Top Cybersecurity Leaders

Cruisecon privacy & AI

Agenda

1st Day

October 3, 2026

Networking and Welcome

4:00 PM

Global 500 CISO Ask Me Anything Panel

5:00 PM
Cory Watts
Cory Watts
Chief Information Security Officer, Memorial Health System.
Justine Bone
Justine Bone
Executive Director, Crypto ISAC

2nd Day

October 4, 2026

Dead in the Water-What ! Terrorism Taught Me About the Threats You're Actually Facing

Dexter Ingram spent thirty years hunting terroristsโ€”from a forward operating base in Afghanistanโ€™s Helmand Province to the corridors of INTERPOL headquarters in Lyon to back-channel negotiations with governments that didnโ€™t always want to cooperate. What he kept running into, especially toward the end of his career, was how much the threat had changedโ€”and how much it had started to look like a cybersecurity problem. The same encrypted platforms your security team monitors. The same social engineering tactics your awareness training covers. The same human vulnerabilities your insider threat program tries to catch. Extremist organizations figured out the digital environment faster than most people in government were willing to admit, and the consequences of that lag are still playing out. In this talk, Ingram pulls from his time running the State Departmentโ€™s Office of Countering Violent Extremism, directing the 89-nation coalition to defeat ISIS, and coordinating counterterrorism responses from INTERPOL to walk through what the national security world learnedโ€”sometimes the hard wayโ€”about adversaries who adapt, disappear, and rebuild faster than any bureaucracy can track them. Heโ€™ll get into what AI-driven radicalization actually looks like in practice, why the timelines are compressing in ways that should concern anyone managing organizational risk, and what thirty years of coalition-building taught him about the difference between having intelligence and knowing what to do with it. No classified information he canโ€™t shareโ€”just hard-won perspective from someone who spent three decades in the rooms where these decisions get made and watched the threat follow us all online.

7:00 AM
Dexter Ingram
Dexter Ingram
Former Deputy Director for WMD Terrorism, US Department of State

AI as the Next Insider Threat: Data Manipulation, Cognitive Trust, and the Weaponization of Decision Intelligence

Artificial intelligence is rapidly becoming a trusted decision authority inside private enterprises, shaping capital allocation, cyber defense prioritization, fraud detection thresholds, supply chain strategy, and M&A diligence. This presentation explores a critical but underexamined risk around AI as the next insider threat, not because it is malicious, but because it can be quietly influenced. When adversaries manipulate training data, telemetry streams, third-party intelligence feeds, or retrieval pipelines, they do not need to breach systems to cause damage; they only need to shape the inputs that drive the outputs. The result can be distorted risk models, skewed financial forecasts, misaligned security investments, and materially flawed executive decisions. Drawing on Cold War intelligence paradigms in which controlling information streams shaped strategic outcomes, this session reframes AI as a modern influence channel inside private industry. It also examines the psychology of human reliance on machine-generated authority and why automation bias amplifies the impact of corrupted data. The talk concludes with mitigation steps focused on preserving data integrity, protecting decision quality, and safeguarding financial outcomes in AI-enabled enterprises.

8:00 AM
Erin Whitmore
Erin Whitmore
Head of the Adversary Pursuit Group, BlackPoint Cyber.

Aligning Worldwide Privacy Regulations

9:00 AM
Adriana Antunes Winkler
Adriana Antunes Winkler
Global Privacy Lead, Accenture

Professionalizing the Privacy Future

Historically, our work in data protection has focused on the alignment between organizational policies/practices and the privacy laws and rules established by nations. While compliance remains a core responsibility of todayโ€™s privacy professional, emerging technologies such as AI, blockchain and Quantum are exerting new and acute pressures on information rights as well as on intellectual property ownership. These challenges make us question the practical effectiveness of legal and regulatory responses. Is our goal the continued preservation of law as the sole remediation to privacy harms? Or does the future demand something fuller, stronger and more expedient? A leading privacy educator and advisor argues for a multi-disciplinary approach that incorporates design, ethics, cultural literacy and technology itself into our privacy work. This approach will strengthen information protection, elevate us as privacy professionals and bring data value, rather than just compliance cost, to the organizations we serve.

10:00 AM
Peter B. Kosmala
Peter B. Kosmala
Former Vice President, IAPP

Group Lunches and Networking

11:30 AM

Roundtables

2:00 PM

3th Day

October 5, 2026

Costa Maya, Group Excursions

4th Day

October 6, 2026

Cozumel, Group Excursions

5th Day

October 7, 2026

AI is Just Math

7:00 AM
Ira Winkler
Ira Winkler
Chief Information Security Officer, CYE SECURITY

AI in Security: Two Years In - What Worked, What Didn't

Remember when ChatGPT was going to revolutionize your security program overnight? Two years into production deployments, it's time for an honest conversation about what actually happened when LLMs met the reality of 24/7 security operations, application security and cyber threat intelligence. This talk cuts through the vendor hype to share real-world experiences integrating AI into security workflows. We'll explore specific use cases where LLMs genuinely improved securityโ€”from automating alert triage to synthesizing threat intelligenceโ€”and more importantly, where they failed spectacularly. You'll learn why that "AI-powered code improvement recommendations" POC crashed and burned, and how hallucinating LLMs almost caused priority one incidents. The session deep-dives into the risks nobody wants to discuss: what happens when your incident data trains someone else's model, how attackers can manipulate AI-driven security decisions through prompt injection, and why relying on AI to triage alerts can either be the best or worst decision you make this year. We'll outline battle-tested guardrails including data handling requirements, access control strategies, and the critical "human-in-the-loop" checkpoints that separate success from disaster. Attendees will leave with a practical framework for evaluating AI integration in their own SOCs, a clear understanding of the security and privacy implications, and most importantly, realistic expectations about what AI can and cannot do for a security program. Whether you're actively using LLMs, still evaluating, or have been told "absolutely not" by legal, you'll gain actionable insights from our year-long journey of successes, failures, and lessons learned the hard way. No vendor pitches, no hand-waving about AGI solving all our problemsโ€”just practical experiences from the trenches of running AI-augmented security program.

8:00 AM
Kurt Kaufmann
Kurt Kaufmann
Leader of the Application Security, Blizzard Entertainment

AI in Security: Two Years In - What Worked, What Didnโ€™t

Remember when generative AI was going to transform security programs overnight? Two years into practical adoption, the results are more complicated. This talk examines how security teams are using AI across security operations, application security, vulnerability management, and threat intelligence, drawing on firsthand experience and broader industry examples. We will explore where large language models provide real value, including analyzing vulnerabilities, investigating alerts, explaining unfamiliar code and attack paths, summarizing threat intelligence, generating test ideas, and identifying remediation options. We will also look at where they fall short. AI-generated conclusions can be plausible but wrong, overlook environmental controls, misjudge severity, or recommend actions that create additional risk. Without sufficient context, an impressive answer can become a bad security decision. These limitations matter whether AI is reviewing scanner output, researching an emerging threat, or helping analysts triage alerts. A model can organize evidence and suggest next steps, but it cannot independently confirm production conditions, compensating controls, attacker behavior, or business impact. Those conclusions still require validation and human judgment.

9:00 AM
Jerich Beason
Jerich Beason
Chief Information Security Officer, Waste Management (WM)

Executive Presence: Becoming the Leader People Trust at the Next Level

Technical expertise can build credibility, but it does not automatically prepare a leader for the next level. In this keynote, Sean Barnes breaks executive presence into practical, learnable skills that shape how leaders are perceived in high stakes environments. He explores how confidence, communication, listening, business understanding, professional presence, and the ability to build trust all work together to influence whether others see someone as ready for greater responsibility. Attendees will leave with practical ways to strengthen how they show up in meetings, presentations, boardroom conversations, and other critical leadership moments.

10:00 AM
Sean Barnes
Sean Barnes
CEO, Wolf Executives.

Group Lunches and Networking

11:30 AM

Roundtables

2:00 PM

Closing Reception

5:00 PM

6th Day

October 8, 2026

Departure

Conference Speakers

Adriana Antunes Winkler
Cory Watts
Dexter Ingram
Erin Whitmore
Ira Winkler
Jennifer Ewbank
Jerich Beason
Justine Bone
Kurt Kaufmann
Peter B. Kosmala
Sean Barnes
Shawn Chakravarty

OFFICIAL

SPONSORs.

Don’t miss this unique opportunity to engage with Cybersecurity Practitioners and Executives at this one-of-a-kind Conference.

Pre-departure hotel

Residence Inn by Marriott Galveston Islandโ€จ
75HV+HC2 Galveston, Texas, USA
+1 409-295-4111

For attendees, we recommend booking your stay at “hotel name”. Please use the following link to view details and make your reservation.

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MEET WITH THE EXPERTS

Keep Up with
the Latest
from CruiseCon

For immediate attention
contact@cruisecon.com
(443) 994 0245

Connect with our team
Linkedin