We’re very fortunate to be hosting an amazing line up of presenters at SECURITY2CURE 2025!
Kelsy Luengen
​Security Influencer - SEEK.
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Presenting: Keynote - How to socially engineer compliance for your security program
In the world of cybersecurity, social engineering is often seen as a threat vector; a tool used by attackers to exploit human psychology. But what if we turned that tactic on its head? This talk explores how principles of social engineering and behavioural science, particularly nudge theory, can be harnessed to drive meaningful engagement and compliance within your security program. We'll dive into the psychology behind decision-making, examine how subtle environmental and cultural cues can shift user behaviour, and outline practical strategies for achieving normative compliance. Whether you're launching a new policy or trying to reduce shadow IT, this session will equip you with a smarter, more human-centred approach to influencing security culture.
Bio: Kelsy Luengen is a Security Influencer at SEEK and a doctoral researcher at the University of Queensland. In her capacity as a Security Influencer, Kelsy develops evidence-based Security Culture campaigns and training materials to promote a strong security mindset, encourage an inclusive security culture, and decrease the risk of victimization across the business. Her doctoral research is in cybercrime victimisation and uses a randomised control design to explore the effectiveness of different online nudges to improve defensibility against email-based cyberthreats. Her research uses eye-tracking technology to better understand the extent to which users of internet enabled devices recognise cyber threats, their response to perceived threats, and their use of protective behaviours to mitigate potential harms. Prior to a career in security, Kelsy worked as an evidence-based criminological researcher with her main work focusing on how to increase trust in the police to increase legislative compliance and voluntary reporting. Kelsy is a strong advocate for inclusivity and diversity in the workplace, and happily adds to the security body of knowledge by sharing her research at conferences and via online publications.
Phil Cole
Security Analyst
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Presenting: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Third Party Cyber Security Incidents
Third party cyber security incidents are like a hot potato - no one wants to deal with them. But they are, in fact, a gift for internal incident response teams. Not only are they an opportunity to develop and hone incident management skills, but even more importantly, they give you the means to establish your place in the organisation as a trusted and reliable incident management function. I’ll talk about my experiences using third party security incidents as a way to uplift internal incident response capability.
Bio: Phil has more than 20 years’ experience in engineering and cybersecurity technical management, with both operator and leadership roles within enterprise security operations teams in financial services and higher education. He has also helped to establish threat intelligence sharing groups for different markets, including state government agencies and higher education, and prior to moving into cyber security he worked in biomedical engineering and human factors. His diverse background brings unique insights into the field of cyber security operations and incident response.
Richard Billington
AWS Security Response Team
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Presenting: Best practices for containing AWS resources during incident response
Presentation Abstract: Learn best practices for implementing isolation controls for AWS resources and accounts during security events. Through practical scenarios, discover effective approaches for isolating Amazon EC2 instances, AWS Lambda functions, and Amazon ECS containers. Explore comprehensive strategies for account-level isolation including identity, resource, and network controls. This session provides guidance on implementing isolation controls as part of your response procedures. Leave with actionable patterns for strengthening your AWS incident response capabilities.
Bio: "After studying software engineering and computer science at the University of Queensland, Richard started his working life as a Solaris sysadmin at the University of Queensland before joining the AUSCERT coordination centre team and later managing it. Eventually the lure of financial crime and fraud (or preventing and detecting them, of course) drew Richard across to Suncorp Group where he joined the Security Threat Analysis and Response Team. After a couple of years Richard started managing that team as a rebuild and upgrade of the Incident response and SOC capability kicked off. Following that, and a quick year testing the waters as a security architect at Suncorp, Richard joined the AWS Customer Incident Response Team where he helps customers of all sizes who are having a bad day in the cloud."
Thomas Ponnet
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Presenting: Burnout in Cybersecurity – How Anarchism may help you
Burnout has been on the rise for the last 15 years. Given the challenges in cybersecurity, regardless if you are a Pentester, Analyst, Engineer, PM, Consultant, Risk or Team Manager you will have been under stress. This talk investigates what takes people from stress to burnout, and how questioning assumed or real authority and adopting an anarchist community approach can help prevent and recover from it. The talk will demystify what burnout is and what it isn’t. It will describe the factors contributing to burnout, symptoms that can be observed by yourself and others, and will include real examples from myself and other people who went through rehabilitation with some recovering and some not. There will be real life examples of the mental and physical connection and what weird and astonishing forms this can take. Examples: Some very fit people couldn’t cycle 200m when burned out, an architect could work for 5 minutes and then couldn’t do primary school level calculations anymore, some weren’t able to remember triple digit numbers for 3 seconds, etc. I’ll start with a content warning as some examples can be distressing as the talk shows people at the end of their strength and who subsequently hit emotional and physical rock bottom. What people will take home is a better understanding of their own reactions to stress and potential burnout, learn how to look out for warning signs in their colleagues, team members, and managers, and learn how some anarchist principles can be used for good. The principles include questioning authority, mutual aid, self-management, and mutual decision making – sounds almost like the original agile spirit. I’ll end on a hopeful note and with some work and management practices that support people long term."
Bio: Thomas has worked for over 20 years in IT and 25 years as a people manager. Thomas is a husband, father, archery coach, vegan, critical thinker, introvert, and Cybersecurity Consultant and Manager, not always in that order. He has lived in 5 different countries and had different jobs across various industries. Thomas is interested in supporting people and giving back to the community, which is why I'm talking about anarchy and burnout.
Alex Desmond
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Presenting: Be a better manager by observing the bad ones
My experience from being in the military where you are taught to lead and then how that is applied to the corporate roles I've been in. The pros and cons and what is missing from both. How organizations no matter the size can equip their people better which drives better culture.
Bio: Alex joined the military in 2013 and served for just under 8 years where he managed teams of up to 20 people. Alex then held a cybersecurity corporate role for over 10 years - working in a variety of roles from team lead to technical individual contributor. In his spare time Alex coaches people in online fitness and spends time with his two dogs.
Courtney Vedelago
Researcher
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Presenting: Nanotechnology for early and precise monitoring of cancer and the human immune system.
Bio: ​Courtney began her research career at UQ’s School of Biomedical Sciences where she studied novice yet potential mechanisms for heart attacks and its implications on cardiac health. From this she gained enough skills in histology to work in the Anatomical Pathology department at the Princess Alexandra hospital before returning to academic research at UQ’s Australian Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology as a PhD student. Courtney is now a researcher developing nanotechnologies with single-molecule detection for various biomedical applications. Her PhD thesis specifically focused on long-COVID and the immunological and cardiovascular effect on patients.