ASHLEY ROSE
The Pioneer of Human Risk Management
Keynote
CEO and Co-Founder, Living Security
Raised over $20 million in funding since founding the company in 2017
Austin Technology Council First-Time Founder Award (2024)
Board Member and Chief Advisor, Women in CyberSecurity (WiCyS) Austin
Contributor, Forbes Technology Council
Human Risk Management
For years, the cybersecurity industry treated employees as "the weakest link," a liability to be trained around rather than an asset to invest in. Ashley Rose, CEO and co-founder of Living Security, has spent nearly a decade arguing that framing has it backward. In her Keynote, she makes the case for Human Risk Management: a model that treats people not as a vulnerability to patch but as an organization's most adaptive line of defense. Drawing on the journey of building Living Security from a scrappy "Cyber Escape Room" startup into a platform trusted by Mastercard, Verizon, and JPMorgan, Rose explores what it actually takes to turn security awareness into measurable, lasting behavior change, especially as AI reshapes both the threats organizations face and the workforce defending against them.
His 2024 paper, "A Mathematical Framework for the Problem of Security for Cognition in Neurotechnology," is one of the first rigorous, formal treatments of cognitive security, drawing on information theory, cryptography, and neuroscience to describe the algorithmic problems faced by attackers who threaten cognitive privacy and autonomy, and the defenders working to stop them. His work introduces "cogits," a cognitive analog to the bit in information theory, laying groundwork for a mathematical language capable of describing cognitive security problems with the same precision cryptography brought to information security.