What We Learned About Security Resilience at CornCon 11

Read full article here: https://blog.gitguardian.com/corncon-11/?utm_source=nhimg

CornCon 11 brought together over 400 security practitioners, CISOs, engineers, and ethical hackers to explore what it truly means to build resilient, sustainable cybersecurity programs in today’s AI-driven and resource-constrained world. The recurring message across more than 50 sessions and workshops was clear: security resilience doesn’t come from new tools—it comes from mastering the fundamentals, aligning with real-world risk, and strengthening human collaboration.

The event, hosted in Davenport, Iowa, reflected on how trust, communication, and fundamentals can make or break defenses, much like the historic Mississippi River bridge that inspired its opening story. Across three days, industry experts discussed culture, burnout, misconfigurations, threat actor psychology, red-blue collaboration, and the urgent need to simplify and sustain cybersecurity practices.

Key Themes and Highlights

1-Sustainability Over Perfection

In “Cybersecurity Doesn’t Need a Six-Pack: Embrace the Dadbod,” Douglas Brush, Cyber & Privacy Personal Trainer at Brush Cyber, challenged the illusion of “perfect security.”
He argued that security success has become overly aesthetic, driven by hero worship and burnout culture. Brush shared how chasing zero-risk ideals leads to exhaustion and fragile programs. Instead, he urged leaders to prioritize defensibility, consistency, and fundamentals—like enforcing MFA universally—before pursuing advanced frameworks or flashy AI integrations.
His message: “Stop chasing perfection. Build sustainable strength.”

2-When Conditional Access Becomes Conditional Exposure

Brandon Colley, Senior Security Consultant at TrustedSec, demonstrated how Microsoft Entra Conditional Access can become a security liability when poorly managed.
He highlighted “policy sprawl,” where organizations stack up to 195 overlapping policies, creating confusion and inconsistent coverage. His practical advice included:

• Requiring MFA for all privileged roles.
• Using tools like Conditional Access What If, MFASweep, and maester.dev for continuous policy testing and tuning.
  Colley’s core message: simplify, standardize, and verify. Complexity is the enemy of control.

3-Every Villain Has an Origin Story

In “Cyber Super Villains: The Real-Life Threats Lurking in Our Digital World,” Paige Hanson, Co-Founder of SecureLabs, used comic book archetypes to decode modern threat actors.
She compared villains like Mystique (impersonation), Magneto (ransomware control), and Scarecrow (fear-driven attacks) to today’s AI-enhanced fraud and modular cybercrime ecosystems.
Her insight: attackers are no longer lone geniuses—they are scalable, composable enterprises. Defenders must respond with the same unity, collaboration, and creativity.
Her rallying cry: “Be the Avengers—bring your skills together to fight evolving threats.”

4-Offensive Insight with a Defensive Heart

Sean Juroviesky, Senior Security Engineer at SoundCloud, called out the limitations of traditional penetration testing in “Bridging the Gap: Delivering Offensive Insights to the Blue Team.”
He explained that most pentests have become checkbox exercises that don’t drive real improvement. The average time to resolve critical findings? Over 3 years.
Sean advocated for a red-blue partnership model, where findings are prioritized by business impact, not just technical severity. He urged security teams to diagram downstream risks, highlight dependencies, and collaborate on feasible remediation paths.
His takeaway: “Pentests should transform, not just perform.”

5-Back to Basics: People Over Tools

Across panels and sessions, experts reinforced a shared truth: technology alone cannot fix security. The most resilient programs are powered by disciplined teams, shared ownership, and simple, well-practiced fundamentals.
Core recommendations included:

• Enforcing MFA for all admins and keeping location-based rules precise.
• Communicating risk in business language to gain executive support.
• Encouraging sustainable work practices over burnout heroics.
• Treating automation as augmentation, not replacement, for human judgment.

Security, as many speakers noted, is a human craft built on trust, empathy, and repetition—not just automation.

6-Simple Practices for Durable Resilience

The closing message from CornCon 11 was powerful in its simplicity: resilience is earned, not installed.
Effective security comes from steady fundamentals, empathetic leadership, and cross-team trust. Teaching the why behind security practices helps them endure long after the consultants leave.

If organizations want lasting security outcomes, they must invest in people—help practitioners learn, share, and recover together. When findings are tied to business outcomes and success is measured by collaboration, security stops being a cost center and becomes a culture of resilience.

Core Takeaways

• Resilience > Perfection: Focus on fundamentals and sustainability over flawless optics.
• Simplify Access Controls: Policy clarity beats policy quantity.
• Humanize Security: Burnout and complexity are threats too.
• Collaborate Across Teams: Red and Blue must work as one.
• Trust Is Built, Not Bought: Culture and communication sustain defenses.