I don’t know why, but putting together the program for Swiss Cyber Storm 2026—theme: Shadow IT—was a real challenge. But now it’s time for a brief overview of the speakers at this conference.

What I’m most excited about is the opening keynote by U.S. Lieutenant General (Ret.) Karen H. Gibson.

But we have plenty more to offer as well. Here’s a brief overview:

• Sébastien Schnyder observes criminals at work using Google AI. He illustrates their actions with concrete examples and explains what we should learn from them.
• Hannes Lubich classifies various forms of shadow IT into a taxonomy and explains how we should address them.
• Nadim Kobeissi introduces his software, Verifpal, and demonstrates how it can be used to analyze complex protocols without in-depth knowledge of cryptography.
• Felix Linker is working on the Red Cross’s digital emblem, which aims to make online infrastructure visible and identifiable to attackers.
• Tin Zaw takes a closer look at HTTP traffic and identifies bot traffic as shadow traffic. He also highlights what can be done about it today.
• Mazin Ahmed at Fullhunt.io examined the attack surface across Switzerland specifically for us. In the process, he discovered a great deal of shadow IT.
• Andreas Maurer focuses on digital fraud—a topic that is currently also of concern to FINMA. Here, he presents his Trident Resilience Framework.
• Marco Brenner works at IBM on quantum computers, a topic that is no longer far in the future but is often approached incorrectly.
• Loïc Maréchal has examined the cyber research landscape in Swiss industry. He presents his gap analysis and provides access to his data.
• Ivano Somaini is at the forefront when it comes to the use of technology in the field of OSINT. AI opens up entirely new avenues. He’ll show us how.
• Stéphane Adamiste has been auditing Switzerland’s e-voting system for years. He’ll share his key findings and assess the system’s security.
• Jeroen van der Ham-de Vos has a wealth of experience with vulnerability management, a field that has come under new pressure due to AI. So what needs to be done?

An Gaiser from the Netherlands will wrap up the event and discuss various aspects of deepfakes in her keynote. On the one hand, we fear that our users will fall for deceptively realistic deepfakes. On the other hand, this trustworthiness is also the key to constructive user cooperation in preventing cyberattacks. An Gaiser has some provocative theories in store. I’m very excited to hear them.

See the full program here.

By the way, we’re not allowed to film General Gibson’s opening keynote or Sébastien Schnyder’s extremely hot talk. The Swiss Cyber Storm Conference on October 20, 2026, therefore, offers an exclusive opportunity to see these presentations.

About the author

Dr. Christian Folini

Program Chair Moderator Arena

netnea AG

Christian Folini is a security engineer with twenty years of experience defending web applications and the infrastructure behind them. His work has increasingly moved from the technical trenches into the political arena: he is a vocal contributor to Swiss debates on e-voting, e-collecting and the governance of cybersecurity. He represents civil society on the steering committee of the National Cyberstrategy. A PhD in medieval history taught him to explain hard technical problems in plain language. As program chair, he curates the Swiss Cyber Storm lineup and moderates it every year.
Read more …