RBLN Europe 2026

Welcome to the Rebellion

Doors open. Grab your badge, set up your exhibit space, and start connecting with the RBLN community.

Underground Exhibits

Open all day. Think less trade show, more operator playground. The RBLN Underground brings together cutting-edge companies, interactive experiences, and the technology driving the next wave of disruption.

Opening Remarks

Kick off RBLN with a welcome from the organizers, an overview of the event experience, and a look at the conversations shaping the future of cybersecurity, AI, and modern defense.

Controlled Autonomy: Giving AI Swords, Shields & Adaptive Guardrails

James Foster

What happens when AI gets weapons but no rules about how to use them. State-sponsored intrusions now run 80–90% autonomously. Generative AI has pushed phishing volume up 1,265%. The security industry responded by shipping more fragmented products. James Foster (Foster) makes the case that optimal security has always required offense, defense, and governance working as one system, and that AI finally makes this possible at scale. This session addresses how a continuous system where swords find what's exposed, shields contain what gets through, and adaptive guardrails govern every autonomous action with explainability, reversibility, and policy-bounded authority can address attacker velocity in the AI-attacker era.

The rise of AI attacks – what we should know about AI powered threats

Candid Wüest

• Gain practical insight into how agentic malware operates (prompting, orchestration, tool usage), including where it can adapt to defenses and where it breaks. Enabling better threat modeling and detection engineering. • Learn how to identify and detect AI powered malware using existing behavioral signals and reputation systems, and understand why most current samples do not evade well-configured EDR/XDRs. • Understand the current AI powered threat landscape and be able to differentiate the marketing hype from reality.

Fireside Chat: The Future of AI Innovation Beyond Big Tech

Jasper Wognum ,Seemant Sehgal

Deep Dive Sessions

Built for those who want to go deeper. RBLN Europe’s Deep Dive Sessions move beyond traditional presentations to explore the tools, tactics, architectures, and lessons learned behind today’s most pressing security challenges. These technical, focused sessions provide practitioners with real-world insights, expert-led discussions, and actionable strategies they can take back to their teams. Choose the sessions that align with your interests and the challenges you’re solving today.

6 Hard Lessons from Zero Trust Deployments: What the Field Is Actually Seeing

John Spiegel,Jaye Tillson

Zero Trust has quickly moved from security concept to board-level mandate. Yet the reality inside most organizations is far messier than the architecture diagrams suggest. Based on several hundred interviews with IT and security practitioners as well as the analyst community, this session explores what actually happens when organizations attempt to implement Zero Trust. The findings are sobering: roughly 60–70% of Zero Trust initiatives stall before reaching maturity, and fewer than 20% achieve a fully realized Zero Trust architecture. Rather than focusing on theory or vendor frameworks, this session examines seven hard lessons from the field, highlighting both the successes and the failures organizations encounter along the way. Topics include why many Zero Trust initiatives stall, where organizations underestimate complexity, the architectural decisions that matter most, and what successful deployments do differently. This presentation is not a product pitch. Instead, it’s a candid discussion of the hard realities of Zero Trust deployment, grounded in the experiences of practitioners across hundreds of organizations. Attendees will leave with practical insights into what works, what fails, and how to move a Zero Trust initiative from concept to operational reality.

The 0-day Vending Machine: No Mythos Necessary

Sam Pizzey

1. The AI assisted VR era is already here and has very little to do with frontier models. 2. How you can get started adopting these workflows if you are currently not doing so. 3. What this means for everyone else - what’s the patch timeline in 2026 onwards?

Pooling Forensic Evidence Across Borders Without Creating a Surveillance Dataset

Dmytro Matviiv

•Why pooling forensic evidence is operationally critical but legally dangerous •The design choice that matters most: separating raw artefacts from published intelligence •How AI validation routes submissions without requiring a single trusted authority •A pattern that works across jurisdictions (NL, UA, EU) •Honest limits: what validation still gets wrong

Coffee and Networking Break

SESE: Social Engineering Second Edition The next frontier of security is…

Eddy Willems,Righard Zwienenberg

In the presentation, we will show some older, several newly evolved social engineering attempts with involved, and of course take a peek into the future, where AI, and surely Quantum Computing, will create a Third Edition of Social Engineering. This future promises even more complex threats that challenge the boundaries of identity, authenticity, and trust. As we look ahead, SESE serves as both a warning and a guide, advocating for stronger digital literacy, adaptive defenses, and a forward-looking approach to cybersecurity in an age where machines can manipulate at the speed of thought.

Red-Teaming the Agentic Red-Team

Michal Bazyli

The use of agentic systems to perform offensive security operations has moved from a theoretical possibility to a commoditized capability. However, while the community has focused on creating more and more capable agents, less attention has been allocated to assessing the security of those systems. In this work, we present the first in-depth security analysis of the most widely used agentic systems for offensive security operations. We show that most of these tools share common design flaws that enable an active adversary to exfiltrate API keys, establish persistent footholds, and fully compromise the operator's machine, even when the agent operates inside a sandboxed container. To support our analysis, we introduce a full cyber kill chain for such agentic systems, capturing the progression from initial LLM manipulation to lateral movement, persistence, guardrail bypass, and sandbox escape. Building on our security analysis, we derive a robust architecture for agentic offensive-security tools and propose actionable, broadly applicable design principles that mitigate the disclosed attack paths at the architectural level.

Nick Bartosh, VulnCheck

The (Non)Sense of AI

Righard Zwienenberg,Filip Mazán

The (Non)Sense of AI challenges attendees to distinguish capability from marketing, automation from intelligence, and innovation from operational reality, while offering pragmatic guidance for building, securing, and using AI systems responsibly in an increasingly agentic world.

Founders in Cyber: How to Stand Out, Scale, and Win in a Crowded Market

Katie Soper

In a market full of brilliant products and companies, how do you make people stop, listen and remember you? This session looks beyond the product at the people, reputation and relationships that help companies stand out and scale - and how becoming visible, useful and memorable can create opportunities across customers, talent, investment and beyond.

Access is Not Authority

Michael Mosher

You will watch AI deployments get onboarded — a customer-service agent that can make a customer whole, a SOC triage agent producing thousands of imperfect judgments a day, and a team of agents working a newly disclosed critical vulnerability all the way to a production change — as fictional, deliberately simplified design walkthroughs. You will leave able to name, for any agent or agent system in your own shop, what it may do, where that limit is enforced, what evidence it takes to move, who is mandated to decide what, what authority the pieces can assemble between them, and who remains responsible — and with a practical Authority and Oversight Record and a working handout you can put in front of your team on Monday to ask those questions out loud.

Defense Against the Dark Arts: Securing the Web3 Frontier

Dawn Perry

With $1.2 billion stolen in 2026 alone, modern threat actors are weaponizing sophisticated cross-chain bridge exploits, AI-driven social engineering, and mysterious oracle intelligence at an unprecedented scale. This session maps the rapid evolution of these decentralized threat vectors and delivers critical, battle-tested security lessons straight from the Web3 front lines.

Attention Is the New Attack Surface: What marketers understand about human behaviour that cybercriminals exploit

Sara Carty

• Understand why attention has become one of cybersecurity's most important attack surfaces. •Learn The Attention Attack Chain and apply it to social engineering. • Recognise the behavioural and marketing principles that underpin phishing, deepfakes and AI-enabled deception. •Discover practical ways to design security around human behaviour rather than relying solely on awareness training. • Leave with a new perspective on why protecting attention may become as important as protecting endpoints.

Operation Starfall CTF

We’re building our first CTF, and we need challenge creators. If you’ve ever written a crypto challenge, reverse engineered firmware, found a web vulnerability, or uncovered something interesting through OSINT, we want your brain. This will be a narrative-driven CTF where you play a Rebel intelligence operative. Every challenge you solve captures a classified document. Every document brings the Alliance one step closer to destroying the Death Star. 7 categories. Dozens of challenges. One mission.

Please Don't Hack Me Breakfast (Invite Only)

This Please Don't Hack Me (PDHM) Breakfast brings together a small group of senior security leaders for an intimate, off-the-record roundtable over a private breakfast. 15 people who know what they're talking about, having the conversations that need to be had. No pitches, no slides, no fluff - just real cybersecurity people, real stories and meaningful connections.

Breakfast, Coffee, and Networking

Doors open. Grab your badge and coffee. Check out the Underground exhibits.

Underground Exhibits

Open all day. Think less trade show, more operator playground. The RBLN Underground brings together cutting-edge companies, interactive experiences, and the technology driving the next wave of disruption.

Fireside Chat: Security Leaders Building the Future

Paul Pols,Rogier Fischer,Francisco Dominguez ,Katie Soper

You Are Not Your Startup

Pieter Jansen

The mistakes, trade-offs and lessons nobody talks about

Resilience by Default

Uğur Başak

Same parallel, from the resilience side. Blast-radius containment, golden paths, and idempotent recovery were how Platform Engineering kept the SDLC standing under load. Agentic systems do not change those principles, they raise the stakes. I will show how the resilience patterns we built for pipelines and services apply to AI and agentic workloads, and where the failure modes are genuinely new.

WHEN AI GOES ROGUE: Jailbroken LLMs, Autonomous Agents, and the New Cyber Threat

Senad Aruc

What happens when an LLM stops refusing—and starts acting? This session explores how jailbroken and rogue LLMs, combined with autonomous agents and access to real tools, can transform prompt manipulation into real-world cyber risk. We examine recent incidents, the emerging agentic attack surface, and demonstrate how Imperum Agent Studio can simulate these threats while Virtus Sentinel detects rogue LLMs, prompt injection, jailbreak attempts, and malicious agent behavior—turning the attacker’s AI advantage into a powerful tool for continuously testing and hardening cyber defenses.

The Suggestible Machine: Lessons from Psychology, Cybersecurity and AI Security

Kevin Zwaan

For decades, social engineering has targeted people. Today, it increasingly targets AI. Many AI security failures are not the result of technical exploits, but of influence. By leveraging psychological principles such as trust, persuasion, and framing, humans can manipulate AI systems into bypassing safeguards and violating their intended behaviour. This talk explores what cybersecurity can learn from psychology and why the future of AI security may depend as much on understanding influence as understanding technology.

Networking Lunch

Take a break, grab some lunch, and connect with fellow attendees, speakers, and sponsors. This is a casual networking lunch designed to keep conversations going and create new connections across the community. Visit the exhibit area while you’re here and take time to engage with our partners.

Zero Trust or Bust - The Race against Ransomware Workshop

Jaye Tillson,John Spiegel

Every second counts when a ransomware attack strikes. Are you ready to protect your business and navigate the complexities of a cyber incident? Join this facilitator-led Race Against Ransomware workshop to gain hands-on experience during a simulated ransomware attack to help you sharpen your cyber defense skills. It all starts as a normal workday. Then comes a phishing email, and suddenly all IT systems freeze, operations halt, and a chilling ransomware message appears on all company-managed devices. As a participant, you’ll step into the shoes of the executive leadership team at a mock manufacturing company under siege by a coordinated ransomware attack. Evaluate your ransomware readiness strategy and decision making as you race to protect your company’s data and restore business operations. You’ll leave equipped with a comprehensive toolkit and recommendations to strengthen your company’s cyber resilience posture and disaster recovery plan. Join our workshop to: •Engage in realistic ransomware scenarios that reflect threats facing your organization •Practice making critical decisions and navigating complex situations •Gain actionable insights to help strengthen your cyber resilience strategy •Learn from cybersecurity experts and network with peers to discuss ongoing security challenges

Who Controls the Pace? Controlled Autonomy SecOps and Lessons from the Pitch

Andy Lalaguna

•A clearer way to think about "reactive vs. proactive" security - testing and closing gaps continuously, rather than waiting for a scan cycle or an incident to tell you where they are •A practical look at working across an existing toolset rather than replacing it -where that helps, and where it has limits •A first-hand look at how Aston Villa FC - a growing Premier League club with a small IT team and a historic stadium's worth of third-party risk - used a NIST baseline assessment, 24/7 MDR for Microsoft, and MDR for Log to close real security gaps •How explainability, reversibility, and policy-bounded autonomy let security teams move at machine speed without losing the accountability boards, regulators, and cyber insurers now require

Systems Under Pressure: Scaling from Local Startup to Global Customer Base (Through and Beyond the Global Pandemic)

Clara Gustafson

Clara Gustafson joined as employee #10 and helped grow the company into a $100M+ global cybersecurity leader — through 6 acquisitions, a go public process, and later a re-privatization. Along the way, she built a culture of excellence through hypergrowth, ownership change, and a shift from serving a few engineers and customers to empowering 100+ analysts and thousands of customers worldwide. She'll share a practical playbook for scaling local teams into globally resilient ones, M&A-proofing data and systems, and building threat intelligence operations that hold up through new threats (pandemic) and natural growth alike.

Scaling the Security Team: How Mollie Uses AI as an Assistant for Threat Model Analysis

Afshin Lamei

Scaling manual threat modeling is a significant challenge. At Mollie, microservices and payment flows evolve daily. This forces security engineers to choose: slow product development by attending every architecture review, or risk critical design flaws by stepping back. We addressed this bottleneck by building an AI security assistant. This assistant acts as a first-pass peer reviewer for threat models and system design documents. Our approach does not aim for full automation. Instead, the LLM assistant gathers initial context, flags missing security controls, and highlights policy gaps. It then hands off a refined analysis to human security engineers for final triage.

Technical Talks

Dive into three concurrent technical tracks featuring practitioner-led sessions, real-world case studies, and actionable insights from the industry's top cybersecurity experts. Track 1: AI Security & Emerging Threats – Explore the latest advancements in AI security, emerging attack techniques, and how organizations are preparing for the next wave of cyber threats. Track 2: Offensive Security & Hacking – Learn from ethical hackers and offensive security experts through technical deep dives, exploit research, red team operations, and hands-on hacking methodologies. Track 3: Defense, Resilience & Infrastructure – Discover proven strategies for strengthening cyber resilience, securing cloud and critical infrastructure, modernizing defense operations, and responding to evolving threats.

Pod-tential for Disaster: Hacking Kubernetes from Pod to Cluster

Scott Miller

Throughout the session, you’ll see exactly how bad actors chain these configuration flaws to move laterally, escalate privileges, and ultimately breach critical components. We’ll wrap up by discussing straightforward fixes and best practices that can thwart such attacks in your own deployments. Whether you’re a security pro or just getting started with container orchestration, you’ll come away with a clear understanding of how Kubernetes implementations get hacked—and how to keep them secure. If you want to grasp container security by breaking it first, this talk is for you.

OT Security and Resilience in the AI Age

Jeroen Wijnands

Is OT security different from IT security? Why is this? How does it hold up in the age of AI? What can we do to keep it at least reasonably safe and what happens if we don’t succeed? Jeroen will answer these questions from his personal experience and take you into a niche within the niche of cybersecurity.

Agent Fails: A walkthrough of potential agentic failures and how they are different from existing software bugs.

Robert Hommes

•Most software fails in predictable ways, e.g. 4XX or 5XXX •Agents fail in implicit ways which are hard to capture using deterministic logic •Understanding expected behaviour and agent logic and finding outliers from that base behaviour is the key to making agents more reliable.

N.E.M.E.S.I.S.: Turning the Hunter Into the Hunted

Vincent Swolfs

Every talk in this space is about getting faster at spotting the attacker after they're already inside. I want to talk about what happens when you stop waiting for that and build the door they walk through instead. At Injexion we've spent the last few years baking a deception-driven intelligence platform straight into our architecture. We call it N.E.M.E.S.I.S. (Neural Engine, Multi-Vector Exploitation, Surveillance, Intrusion, System). The idea is simple: detection tells you something happened, deception tells you who, how, and what they wanted. A honeypot that gets touched is unambiguous. There's no legitimate reason for anyone to be there, so the noise problem that kills most SOC tooling basically disappears. In this talk I'll walk through how that actually works. How we build decoys (fake servers, seeded credentials, planted files) that survive basic reconnaissance and look worth stealing. What we capture the moment an attacker interacts with one: source IP, tooling fingerprints, timing, lateral movement pattern. How that raw session data gets turned into attribution, correlated against known actor TTPs, confidence-weighted rather than treated as gospel, and rolled into blocklists and threat reporting that actually gets used. The part I care most about showing is the decision loop. N.E.M.E.S.I.S. surfaces a recommended response (isolate a host, block an indicator, pull forensics) but a human always approves before anything happens. Automation buys us triage time. It doesn't get to make the call. I'll bring the live dashboard on stage and walk through a real incident end to end, from the first touch on a decoy through to the report that goes out the other side. If you're building or running threat intel, this talk is for you.

What We Knew at the Time

Jeff Hamm

•Understand why incident leaders must make decisions before all facts are known. •Learn practical approaches for communicating uncertainty to executives and stakeholders. •Recognize common recovery challenges that delay restoration efforts. •Understand the tension between investigative objectives and business recovery objectives. •Apply lessons learned from real-world breach response engagements.

Not All Refusals Are Equal: Building Domain-Specific Hacking AI from Open Source LLMs

Vadym Hadetskyi

1. A vulnerability scorecard for 26 LLMs — which crack for cybersecurity, which resist, and why the resistant ones aren't necessarily safer. 2. A complete recipe for domain-specific abliteration: dataset design, layer selection, weight modification, evaluation. Reproducible with open-source tools. 3. Understanding of why model safety architecture matters more than model size — and what that means for anyone deploying or attacking AI systems. 4. Live demonstration of a trillion-parameter model that reasons about exploits, writes offensive tools, and plans attacks — without being a general-purpose jailbreak.

Beyond the Pentest Report: Why Pentesting Needs a Management Operating System

Luis Abreu

•Why are reports still taking weeks? •Why do findings live in PDFs? •Why are attack chains recreated every engagement? •Why is customer collaboration still email? •Why is remediation disconnected

Privacy-First Visibility: How to Monitor Privileged and Third-Party Access Without Becoming the Surveillance Problem

Ani Khachatryan

In this session, Ani will explore one of today's biggest challenges in enterprise security: how organizations can gain the visibility needed to protect critical systems without creating a culture of surveillance. Drawing on more than a decade of engineering and product leadership, she will explain why the real challenge is not deciding whether to monitor, but how to design monitoring programs that people can actually trust.

AI in Driver Development: Use Cases, Risks, and Engineering Lessons

Klaudia Zaika

The Race Against Rising Energy Demand: How AI Can Help

Bram Zentveld

•A new way of looking at scarcity in complex systems •How to translate real-world constraints into data problems •Practical examples of how AI (forecasting) creates impact •Why data alone is not enough: the role of organizational change

Closing Panel: Building the Future of Cybersecurity

Thomas Hemker,Matt Chinnery,Gilbert Nyandeje,Michael Mosher,Adam Darrah

Join a panel of industry leaders as they explore the trends, technologies, and leadership strategies shaping the future of cybersecurity. From AI-driven threats and organizational resilience to the evolving role of security leaders, this discussion will examine where the industry is headed—and what organizations must do today to prepare for tomorrow.

Closing Happy Hour

Wrap up RBLN Europe with good drinks, great conversations, and the people who made the event happen. Join fellow practitioners, speakers, sponsors, and security leaders for a relaxed final hour of networking, swapping ideas, and continuing the conversations sparked throughout the conference. No slides. No pitches. Just one last chance to connect, compare notes, and raise a glass before we call it a wrap.

Departure Day

Optional one-on-one meetings and sponsor meetings (by appointment).