Omar Santos is a Distinguished Engineer at Cisco focusing on artificial intelligence (AI) security, cybersecurity research, incident response, and vulnerability disclosure. He is the co-chair of the Coalition for Secure AI (CoSAI) and a board member of the OASIS Open standards organization. Omar is also the chair of the OpenEoX and the Common Security Advisory Framework (CSAF) technical committee. His work led the creation of the CSAF ISO standard.
Omar's collaborative efforts extend to numerous organizations, including the Forum of Incident Response and Security Teams (FIRST) and the Industry Consortium for Advancement of Security on the Internet (ICASI). Omar is the co-chair of the FIRST PSIRT Special Interest Group (SIG) and was the lead of the DEF CON Red Team Village for several years.
Omar is the author of over 25 books, 21 video courses, and over 50 academic research papers. Omar is a renowned expert in ethical hacking, vulnerability research, incident response, and AI security. Omar's work in cybersecurity is also recognized through multiple granted patents. Prior to Cisco, Omar served in the United States Marines focusing on the deployment, testing, and maintenance of Command, Control, Communications, Computer, and Intelligence (C4I) systems.
Take-aways from a tabletop exercise led by CISA's Joint Cyber Defense Collaborative (JCDC), which brought together government and industry leaders to enhance our collective ability to respond to AI-related security incidents.
Learn how to secure the LLM stack, which is essential to protecting data and preserving user trust, as well as ensuring the operational integrity, reliability, and ethical use of these powerful AI models.
Bad actors leverage AI, escalating the complexity and scale of threats. We need robust security measures and proper monitoring in developing, fine-tuning, and deploying AI models.
Cisco has observed instances where threat actors appear to be targeting organizations that do not configure multi-factor authentication
for their VPN users. This highlights the importance of enabling multi-factor authentication (MFA) in VPN implementations.
Recent reports and threat intelligence indicate that cyber attackers are exploiting vulnerabilities in legacy Cisco routers and switches that have not been properly upgraded, configured, or updated with the latest software.
A recent FBI flash bulletin described how cyber actors were able to use the PrintNightmare vulnerability (CVE-2021-34527) and bypass Duo 2FA to compromise an unpatched Windows machine and gain administrative privileges. This did NOT leverage or reveal a vulnerability in Duo.
At Cisco, our leadership made the decision over twenty four years ago that we would clearly publicly communicate security vulnerabilities or other issues that could potentially expose customers to risk....
Back in 2014, I wrote an article that highlighted that global Internet routing table passed the 512,000 or 512k route mark. Today we know that another significant milestone has been...