Amid COVID-19 Crisis, Cybersecurity Executives Look to Virtual Summits for Information, Education

By AIT News Desk On Mar 31, 2020

650,000-Member Data Connectors Community to Hold Its First Virtual Cybersecurity Summit in Los Angeles This Week; Us Secret Service to Deliver Keynote on Agency’s Role in Responding to Financial Threats During Crisis

Data Connectors, representing the largest cybersecurity community in North America, announced it will hold its first Virtual Cybersecurity Summit. The firm, who has put on physical conferences since 1999, responded quickly to keep scheduled events on track with an immersive, online experience.

“Our community – over 650,000 CISOs and other cybersecurity professionals, has universally expressed appreciation that we will continue to provide opportunities for education and collaboration with government agencies and solution providers,” said Dawn Morrissey, CEO and founder at Data Connectors. “While those executives are homebound amid the coronavirus quarantine, their firms are more concerned than ever about protection from advanced threats—our events are where they come to learn what it takes to stay ahead,” she added.

The 2020 Los Angeles Virtual Cybersecurity Summit takes place this Thursday, April 2nd. While this is the 16th event the firm will host to serve the Greater Los Angeles Metropolitan Area, it will be the first time it does so in the virtual event environment. The firm said it augmented the usual community in that area of about 30,000 with an additional 75,000 members of the greater community across all of California and neighboring states Arizona, Nevada, Utah and New Mexico.

“Live virtual summits have been part of our roadmap for some time—this crisis encouraged us to move quickly,” said Michael Hiskey, the firm’s chief strategy officer. “Rather than simply postponing events, or attempting some sort of boring, elongated webinar, we needed to offer a fully immersive, virtual event experience to facilitate collaboration for our cybersecurity community,” he asserted.

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Keynote presentations from Facebook and the United States Secret Service top the full-day agenda, which will also feature nine industry expert presenters and 30 virtual exhibits from cybersecurity solution providers.

Assistant Director Michael D’Ambrosio, of the US Secret Service’s Office of Investigations, will discuss the agency’s role in defending critical financial infrastructure as well as in responding to financial threats during the COVID 19 crisis.
Michael Husnik, Head of Protective Intelligence for Facebook, will discuss how his team performs risk mitigation and investigation of nefarious actors targeting Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, Oculus and Calibra.

The Virtual Summit will also feature an interactive panel discussion with some of the top Chief Information Officers (CIOs) and Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) from Los Angeles-area firms, including:

E.J. Hilbert, Managing Director & CISO, CNM LLP
Chris McMasters, Chief Information Officer, City of Corona, CA
Mohammed Bagha, Deputy CISO, Kayne Anderson Capital Advisors
David Hanighen, Chief Information Security Officer, Logix Federal Credit Union
Donny Fan, Chief Information Officer, APLA Health

Attendees from the community of over 600 cybersecurity professionals registered for the summit will ask questions and interact online with the CISOs, as well as each other and the organizations who will feature their solutions at the event. Solution providers for the LA Summit include Morphisec, Avanan, OneTrust, Aria Cybersecurity Solutions, Arcserve, Netskope, Illusive Networks, Spirion, Armis and many others.