Keynote: Hybrid Hostilities: Defending Critical Infrastructure in a Hybrid Threat Landscape

Ukraine is shaping the future of cyber defence in the face of the world’s largest ongoing cyber conflict. Every attack brings new lessons — and every response strengthens the resilience needed for tomorrow’s threats. Colonel Ivan Kalabashkin will share first-hand experience from the cyber front line, revealing how Ukraine confronts state-sponsored attacks, protects critical systems, […]

Geopolitical Liminality in Cyberspace

“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.” — Antonio Gramsci Writing from prison, Antonio Gramsci described the world he lived in as liminal and unstable – seeing an old order fade and a new yet to emerge. He called these “times of monsters”: […]

Cyber Operations and Critical Infrastructure in Conflict

This session provides an intelligence‐based assessment of state actor cyber operations against critical infrastructure before and during armed conflict. Using the Venezuelan energy case and lessons from Russian operations in Ukraine, it examines what cyber tools actually achieved, their limits, and why the Venezuelan case is not directly comparable to Europe. The talk offers a […]

Beneath Arrakis:Unmasking Hydra Saiga’s Covert Operation

On a desert world, Hydra Saiga mines “spicetelligence” from government, defense, and infrastructure targets across Central Asia, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe. This APT aligns with its sponsor’s geopolitical interests—specifically water and gas strategy—while largely evading Western scrutiny. We will explore their TTPs and targets using a custom tool that intercepts the actor’s Telegram-as-a-C2 […]

Sovereignty by Design: Europe’s SaaS Resilience Playbook

Europe’s digital sovereignty agenda is legitimate and necessary. But the market cannot deliver homegrown solutions fast enough — spreading investment too thin risks building a monoculture that makes adversaries’ jobs easier. Meanwhile, Baltic cable sabotage, service termination by decree, and an unpredictable transatlantic relationship have turned theoretical cut-off scenarios into planning realities. This session delivers […]

What’s your business here? NL-UA cybersecurity collaboration in practice

As the full-scale war in Ukraine enters its fifth year, the country is dealing with daily cyber-attacks. At the same time, cyber-attacks in The Netherlands have consistently increased. Both countries are host to a plethora of cyber experts working in the private sector. What happens when they combine forces? This panel discussion considers the impact […]

Single Country of Failure is the metric you’re missing

Your redundant architecture has a blind spot the size of a continent. While you’ve eliminated every Single Point of Failure, your vendor ecosystem may be balanced on a single jurisdictional chokepoint, one sanctions package away from going dark. We call this the New Dutch Disease: just as a booming gas sector hollows out the rest […]

What Yesterday’s Cyber Ops Tell Us About Tomorrow

A destructive cyberattack on Poland’s energy infrastructure was more than another cyber incident. It was a warning of how state-aligned operations are evolving across Europe. Cyberattacks, disinformation, economic pressure, AI and autonomous systems are increasingly being combined to create strategic impact without crossing the threshold of conventional war. At the same time, capabilities once reserved […]

Staying in Control When Geopolitics Becomes the Crisis

Geopolitics has long been treated as background noise in cybersecurity, relevant for strategic discussions, but rarely for day‐to‐day operational decision‐making. That assumption no longer holds. Rising geopolitical tensions increasingly spill into the digital domain, affecting public organizations not only through cyberattacks, but also via sanctions, legal orders, supplier disruption, and political pressure on technology providers. […]