Featured Presenters
Lizzie Cookson
Senior Director of Incident Response Coveware
Lizzie Cookson is a Senior Director of Incident Response at Coveware with over 10 years of experience as a ransom negotiator. Prior to cyber extortion negotiations, she was a digital forensic investigator for a boutique forensics firm in Washington, DC. Coveware handles 50+ extortion negotiations every month; in her role, Lizzie assists enterprises in their recovery from ransomware/extortion incidents and provides subject matter expertise on negotiation tactics and threat actor profiling.
Brian Resler
Vice President in Engagement Management
Stroz Friedberg, a LevelBlue company
Brian Resler is a Vice President in Engagement Management at Stroz Friedberg, a LevelBlue company, where he leverages his technical understanding and deep experience in litigation to guide clients and their in-house and outside counsel throughout the lifecycles of complex technical investigations. He oversees engagements involving cybercrime and data breach response, as well as digital forensics, including internal corporate fraud, employee misconduct, due diligence, and theft of intellectual property. Mr. Resler also assists clients in a variety of proactive matters to identify and mitigate current and future risks. Mr. Resler’s previous experience includes 24 years as a federal and state prosecutor, with cases ranging from large-scale gang and drug trafficking organizations to economic espionage. He most recently served as the Assistant Deputy Chief for Litigation at the Computer Crime & Intellectual Property Section of the Criminal Division in the U.S. Department of Justice, where he supervised the Section’s nationwide caseload, and specialized in trade secret, counterfeiting, and cybersecurity investigations, prosecutions, and policy. Mr. Resler received his J.D. from Marquette University Law School in 1995, and earned dual undergraduate degrees, in Microbiology and Philosophy, from the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 1990.
Heidi Wachs
Managing Director, Engagement Management
Stroz Friedberg, a LevelBlue Company
Heidi L. Wachs is Managing Director, Engagement Management, and head of the Washington, D.C. office of Stroz Friedberg, a LevelBlue Company, where she helps clients prepare for and respond to data breach and cybersecurity incidents and develop and implement data privacy and information security programs. Ms. Wachs oversees complex investigations involving the collection, use, and sharing of data and personal information, in particular through the use of APIs, scraping, hacking, cookies, and other third-party web page integrations. Ms. Wachs' experience includes serving as a technical analyst and Chief Privacy Officer for a leading national research university, and she frequently lectures and publishes on best practices for data privacy and breach response, information security, and information governance. Ms. Wachs has led numerous incident responses to ransomware attacks, business e-mail compromises, wire transfer fraud, malware infections, and large-scale data breaches involving personal information. She advises clients and works closely with in-house and outside counsel through the entire lifecycle of matters by quickly assembling digital forensics and incident response teams, supervising the deployment of commercial and proprietary incident response technologies, briefing C-suite executives and other business and legal stakeholders, and coordinating supplemental resources across multiple practice areas, such as the threat intelligence division to conduct deep and dark web monitoring. Ms. Wachs earned her B.A. in Journalism from Lehigh University and her J.D. from the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, where she served as Managing Editor of the Women's Law Journal. She is admitted to the bars of the District of Columbia and the United States Supreme Court and is a certified information privacy professional, CIPP/US.
Brian Markham
Chief Information Security Officer
EAB
Brian Markham is an executive, advisor, hacker, and mentor with more than 25 years of experience in information technology and cybersecurity. He currently serves as the Chief Information Security Officer at EAB, a leading provider of software, marketing, and research services for higher education. Previously, Brian worked as a consultant with KPMG and PwC and held key security roles at the University of Maryland and George Washington University.
John Mahoney
Principal Software Engineer
EAB
From being the sole volunteer inheriting EAB’s legacy SSO to becoming the architect of centralized identity and tenant management platforms, John's journey is a masterclass in turning curiosity into critical infrastructure. For his third appearance on the summit stage, he'll be demystifying the world of quantum security—a topic for which he was uniquely qualified as, frankly, the only person we could find to talk about it.
Yi-Kai Michaels
Principal Security Engineer
EAB
Yi-Kai Michaels is a Principal Security Engineer at EAB. He helps build automation workflows, manage incidents, and keeps security ops sharp. Off duty he’s a chef, a farmer, and a TCG fanatic (Pokemon, Digimon, Neopets). If your investigation is difficult, he’s the one who wants to solve it.
Nam Kim
Security Engineer
EAB
