Here’s what went down at IT Brew’s first in-person event

Whether you are dealing with a crippling case of FOMO from missing IT Brew’s first live event or are reminiscing about one of the seven riveting panels from the day, we’ve got your back.

Last week, IT Brew hosted its “Building Cybersecurity Excellence: Tech, Policy, and People” event in New York City (and virtually). The event tackled a number of different topics—including cloud security, quantum computing, and AI—with several guest speakers including Mastercard Deputy Chief Security Officer Alissa Abdullah, Red Cell Partners Cyber Practice President George Barnes, and CrashPlan CISO Todd Thorsen.

While our panelists dropped several gems during the half-day event, a remark from VP of Product, Identity, at Cisco’s Duo Security Matt Caulfield during our “Identity is the New Spam” panel summed up everything one needs to know about the state of cybersecurity at the moment.

“Yes, there’s a lot to be worried about,” Caulfield said. “Like I said earlier though, don’t worry. There are things that we can do.”

Here’s a roundup of other key remarks from last week’s panel:

​​The remarks below have been edited for length and clarity.

Malwarebytes Cybersecurity Evangelist Mark Stockley said that emerging AI risks are keeping him up at night: What worries me about [prompt injection] is that we’re still struggling with SQL injection and cross-site scripting, which are thoroughly well-known. There’s no mystery about how you protect against those things. We just don’t do it. There’s a lot of mystery about how you protect against prompt injection because the really, really curious thing about AI is that we don’t know how it works. That means that defending against prompt injection is going to be a whole other order of magnitude more difficult than the thing we already don’t do very well at all.

IBM Consulting VP and Global Senior Partner of Cybersecurity Services Dimple Ahluwalia told us that the main thing standing in the way of widespread adoption of quantum cryptoanalysis is doubt: People have this little bit of a belief that it’s way out in the future and so they don’t need to do something about it. The most basic thing that I look at is just starting a dialog, and I think that’s the most important part.

Pursuit GM of Enterprise Thomas Voûte said the industry is pretty “open-minded” toward non-traditional candidates: When you consider the threats that are being faced by organizations, no one’s checking whether that threat has a four-year college degree.

Abdullah told us that Mastercard has been thinking about the “marriage” of AI, quantum, blockchain, and key management for a long time: We at Mastercard are now testing different mechanisms where we can have quantum-safe encryption, and trying to figure it out because guess what. Like I said, we’ve got to be ahead of this. No one wants their transactions to not go through because the keys weren’t secure. You’re going to be looking at Mastercard like, “What are you doing and why?”