Dewayne Hart Speaking Topics

• The Executive Mindset: Where Did I Go Wrong? Owning Cyber Risk Before a Breach

  Why did my cybersecurity program fail? Post-mortems usually blame the tools, the team, or the vendor. The real cause often sits in the boardroom: a deferred upgrade, an unverified compliance report, a green dashboard nobody questioned. Dewayne Hart walks executives back through the decisions that created exposure long before the attack, drawing on his book Cybersecurity Leadership: How to Develop a Successful Mentality and Win. He then introduces the Big 4 Model, which aligns governance, technology, operations, and people under one security mindset so every business decision accounts for cyber risk.

  Attendees will:

  • Assign clear ownership under the Leadership Triangle and grant decision authority before a crisis.
  • Use the Big 4 Model to test whether their security is real or assumed.
  • Answer ""where did I go wrong"" before a breach forces the question.

  Best for: C-Suite, Board, Executive Leadership, Enterprise Summits, Government Leadership

• Lateral Thinking: Stop the AI-Powered Hacker's Next Move Before They Make One

  Your team closed 4,000 tickets last quarter. The attacker read none of them. Adversaries now use AI to scan exposures, chain vulnerabilities, and move laterally faster than any human team can track. Yet most security teams still count scans and closed tickets while the paths to critical systems stay open. Dewayne Hart shows how Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM), backed by AI, cuts an endless patch queue down to the few attack paths that put revenue, data, and operations at risk.

  Attendees will:

  • Find the gateway, not the headline: trace the paths an AI-assisted attacker would take to critical assets.
  • Apply the CTEM cycle and AI to rank fixes by business impact using a P1–P4 model, not raw severity scores.
  • Report progress to executives as attack paths closed, not tickets processed.

  Best for: CISOs, SOC and Vulnerability Management Leaders, IT Operations, Risk & GRC Teams, Industry Conferences

• Human in the Loop: Building Mission-Ready Cyber Teams in the Age of AI

  AI now handles the entry-level work that once trained new cyber defenders, and many organizations have stopped hiring juniors. That cuts costs this year and empties the bench five years out. The talent crisis was never a pipeline problem. It is a leadership problem, and AI has raised the stakes. Drawing on 20 years building Navy teams, Dewayne Hart presents the Mission-First Retention Framework: operational purpose, skill alignment, and leadership accountability, rebuilt for teams where people and AI work side by side.

  Attendees will:

  • Identify which roles AI will reshape, which it will replace, and which skills to build for both despite AI being the new commodity.
  • Hire for capability and AI fluency, not credentials alone, and teach defenders to think like attackers.
  • Discover what keeps cyber talent on the team when pay alone cannot.

  Best for: CISOs, HR Leaders, Security Managers, Workforce Development Conferences, Veteran Transition Events

• The Hacker's Hat Looks Good on You: One Size Fits Every Employee in the Room

  Attackers do not need to break a firewall when an employee will open the door. Most awareness programs end with an annual quiz, so the same organizations fail the same phishing tests year after year. Dewayne Hart hands every person a hacker's hat and shows them their inbox, phone, and daily routine through an attacker's eyes. The hat does not make anyone a hacker; it teaches them to ask the adversary's questions, a concept from his book "The Cybersecurity Mindset: A Virtual and Transformational Thinking Mode". Employees leave as the first line of defense, not the weakest link.

  Attendees will:

  • Spot AI-generated phishing, deepfakes, and pretext calls by thinking like the attacker behind them.
  • Trust their cyber senses when a call or request feels wrong, and report the warning fast.
  • Own their role in defense instead of leaving security to IT.

  Best for: All-Employee Conferences, Cybersecurity Awareness Month, HR & Culture Events, Healthcare, Government, Education

• AI Under Attack: How Executives Can Govern, Defend, and Win the AI Arms Race

  AI is your most productive tool and your adversary’s most productive weapon—and most organizations govern the first while ignoring the second. Dewayne Hart shows leaders where the exposure actually sits: the AI tools already running without approval, the data those tools absorb and leak, and the adversarial techniques that turn a trusted model into an open attack surface.

  Walk out able to:

  • Recognize where unapproved AI is already operating inside your own environment.
  • Ask governance questions that surface risk before you approve a deployment.
  • See how adversarial AI and deepfakes undercut the controls you already trust.

  Best for: C-Suite, Board, Technology

• Mission Ready: How to Transform Build, Retain, and Lead Elite Cybersecurity Teams

  The cyber talent crisis is not a pipeline problem—it is a leadership problem. Organizations chase identical candidates, then lose them inside two years to burnout and stalled growth. Drawing on 20 years building mission-critical teams in the U.S. Navy, Dewayne Hart introduces the Mission-First Retention Framework: operational purpose, skill alignment, and leadership accountability.

  Walk out able to:

  • Evaluate non-traditional candidates on capability instead of credentials alone.
  • Identify what drives burnout and which conditions leadership actually controls.
  • Give your people a reason to stay that compensation alone can never buy them.

  Best for: CISOs, HR Leaders, Security Managers, Workforce Development Conferences

Read More +