This past week, San Antonio was home to the inaugural Texas Cyber Summit – a gathering of nearly a thousand security industry practitioners at a highly technical cyber conference. The San Antonio Chamber’s CyberSecurity San Antonio program collaborated with the organizers of the conference to support their first annual event and ensure the local ecosystem was involved and engaged in the speeches, technical training and networking events.
During the Summit, CyberSecurity San Antonio hosted an Executive Security Officer (ESO) Roundtable, which brought together senior security executives to discuss best practices in information sharing. Three years ago, the Chamber’s Cybersecurity Council formed a task force that developed and produced the cybersecurity strategy as part of the Good to Great to Global (G3) report. The Cybersecurity Industry Council has been actively engaged with local municipal organization leadership in advocating for the development of consolidated security operations and information sharing. Through the great work of partners such as the City of San Antonio and CPS Energy, San Antonio’s municipal agencies have been closely coordinating to enhance security operations and critical infrastructure resiliency for the community. The ESO Roundtable built upon years of work by ecosystem partners and was a starting point to drive private-sector engagement to support the standup of coordinated municipal security operations.
To close out the first day of the conference, CyberSecurity San Antonio Director Will Garrett participated in a panel discussion on Smart Cities and the City of San Antonio’s SmartSA program. The panel, moderated by KSAT 12 Anchor and Reporter Ursula Pari, featured CPS Energy CEO Paula Gold-Williams City of San Antonio CIO Craig Hopkins, NSA Senior Advisor of Cybersecurity Strategy Rob Joyce, and Devo’s Cyber Business Unit General Manager, Julian Waits. The panel discussed the future of smart city implantation in San Antonio, how the community is uniquely building on its assets to create a more connected and secure city, and the various security risks associated with smart city strategies.
Over the course of three days, the Texas Cyber Summit featured 78 hours of presentations, 67 speakers, 100+ volunteers, 700+ attendees and five Capture the Flag Competitions. To make it all possible, volunteers from the San Antonio Hackers Association, CyberDef Dojo and the cybersecurity community ran over a mile of cable and fiber to standup and secure the Summit’s Network Security Operations Center.
Featured speakers included Jeff Moss, founder of Black Hat & Def Con; Rob Joyce, Senior Cybersecurity Advisor for the National Security Agency; David Kennedy, Founder and CEO, TrustedSec and Binary Defense; and Rob Lee, Founder & CEO, Dragos.
For more information on CyberSecurity San Antonio and how you can plug into Texas’ Cyber Leader, contact Will Garrett (wgarrett@sachamber.org) or Amanda Keammerer (akeammerer@sachamber.org).
