I always make it a point to attend the opening keynote address and this year’s event was kicked off by Paul Eckloff, a 23-year veteran of the U.S. Secret Service, and Haywood Talcove, CEO of Government at LexisNexis Risk Solutions. Together they discussed how adversaries probe and exploit gaps across physical access points, digital systems, and human processes to undermine trust and organizational resilience.

“We’re talking today, obviously about security,” Eckloff told the crowd. “You hear about splashy attacks, kinetic warfare, weapons, assassinations, but really the most dangerous security failure doesn't happen when someone breaks in. It happens when they sort of walk in. Because what we're finding that is that the real battlefield is not the fence. It's the human mind.”

In their keynote, “The Battlefield Beyond the Fence”, Eckloff and Talcove tapped into their decades of security experience delivering practical lessons attendees could put into use. Eckloff, who began his career as a high school biology teacher drew parallels between biology and security and what can be learned.

Biology, Eckloff stated is fundamentally the study of systems that adapt and evolve and it has shaped how he’s looked at security throughout his career.

“I believe that identity acts more like an organism,” he said. “The systems that are attacked are living systems. What has nature already devised that we can learn from in biology? I also learned that anything that looks too perfect is trying to kill me… You only have to evolve that one step, that one bit more in order to defeat your adversary. So, I started looking at security through a different lens.”

Talcove highlighted what happens when cyber, cognitive and physical, is violated, and how much it can cost a company and government, and how it can impact society. Talcove stated that an estimated $1 trillion is being lost each year, paid for by taxpayers through fraud.

“One of the things I talked about recently when I testified in front of Congress was these criminals focus on programs that elected officials and regular citizens like you and me, never want to touch,” he said. “Who doesn't want to make sure somebody has food, who doesn't want to make sure somebody has healthcare or cash assistance?”

The reason these criminals focus on these programs, Talcove said is because they’ve learned the government was an easy target.

“I've always been surprised at the creativity of the attacks,” Eckloff added. “As I showed you today, I didn't go full digital, I went completely analog, I went back to nature. If you really step back from everything we talked about today, whether it's national security, enterprise security, as Talcove talked about — program security, fraud… it's a failure of trust. It's identity that's really being exploited.”

As he wrapped up the keynote address, Eckloff spoke on the importance of partnerships within security stating that the future of security isn't thicker walls rather systems that behave more like organisms.

“We need to understand that security is not a product, it's a partnership. Nothing works separately. It's continuous understanding,” Eckloff said. “Partnerships require that - not blind trust, because every system we try to protect is human, and the next really massive threat is not going to break in, it's going to be led in, and whether or not it works, it's going to be up to all of us.”