FloCon 2025

Blake Anderson currently works as a Principal Engineer in Cisco's Network Security team. Since starting at Cisco in early 2015, he has participated in and led projects aimed at encrypted network traffic analysis, which has resulted in open source projects, academic publications, and patents. He and his collaborators published the initial research that eventually became Cisco’s Encrypted Traffic Analytics (ETA) and Encrypted Visibility Engine (EVE) solutions. Before Cisco, Blake received his PhD in machine learning/security from the University of New Mexico and worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory... Read more

With two IPOs & eight acquisitions, Brian has helped build some of the most successful security companies in the world. He has over 25 years in the security industry as a security company entrepreneur, board advisor, investor, and author. After getting his start with the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) and later Bell Labs, Brian began the process of building security startups and taking multiple companies through successful IPOs and acquisitions, including Riptech, ArcSight, Imperva, McAfee, Solera Networks, Cylance, JASK, Verodin, and Mandiant.

Brian has worked in over 50 countries across six continents. He authored the book Enemy at the Water Cooler and co-authored Physical & Logical Security Convergence with former NSA Deputy Director William Crowell. He was featured in the cyberwar documentary 5 Eyes alongside General Michael Hayden, former NSA, and CIA Director. Brian writes for Forbes and regularly presents at conferences like Black Hat, RSA, OWASP, and BSides... Read more

Hafiz Muhammad Farooq is a Senior Cyber Security Architect for Saudi Aramco's Global Security Operations Centre (SOC). With 16 years of research and professional experience in Cyber and Network Security domain, he is harnessing the first-line-of-defense against a huge spectrum of targeted and untargeted cyber attacks from adversaries. His academic and professional experience helped him to orchestrate the security processes for Saudi Aramco after the well-known Shamoon attack in 2012. He holds masters degree in Next Generation Networks (Aston University, United Kingdom), Computer Engineering degree... Read more

David works in cybersecurity research and development and applied cryptography. He designed authenticated encryption and encrypted voice and video communications standards that are in widespread use, championed open and patent-free cryptography, and pioneered the commercial use of encrypted traffic analysis to defend networked information systems. He is a Fellow at Cisco and holds a Ph.D. in physics from Michigan State University.

Shapor Naghibzadeh is the AI Lead at Google Cloud, co-founder of Chronicle, and a recognized expert in cybersecurity and AI innovation. His career includes a foundational role in building Google's Threat Analysis Group (TAG) and leading the development of Chronicle's Security Operations suite, including the groundbreaking Backstory platform. Shapor's work focuses on leveraging generative AI and large-scale data analytics to transform cybersecurity operations, tackling challenges like alert fatigue and the skills gap in modern security practices.

Dan Ruef is the Technical Manager of the NetSA team in the CERT Division of the Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute. He leads the research and engineering efforts to build capabilities, highlighted by SiLK, that provide network situational awareness by sensing, storing, and analyzing traffic for threats both on-premises and in the cloud. Dan has over 15 years of professional experience in cybersecurity and software engineering.