2026 Conference Talks for Charles Herring

Charles Herring 11 December 2022
Linkboard
New for 2026: abstracts on Coding with AI (lessons from building WitFoo's analytics platform with Claude Code) and Empathetic Processing and Temporal Link Analysis (research pathways for AI in cyber defense). The classics on CyberGrid, SECOPS-as-law-enforcement, and the Seven Unstable Conversations are still on the menu. Bio refreshed for the Chairman era and the New Zealand base

Podcast: Adventures of Alice & Bob

Charles Herring 23 April 2026
Alice and Bob Podcast with Charles Herring
In this episode, James talks to Charles Herring about what happens when an IT wizard runs away to join the Navy, works on fighter jets, and then gets thrown into cybersecurity right after 9/11? He shares his unconventional journey from the Wild West days of network defense, complete with fighting worms with worms—to being CISO during the Target breach. Plus: why trauma creates silos, why your SOC is like throwing receipts in garbage bags, and what it takes to build a "good neighborhood" in cybersecurity.

Three Prompts That Turn Your Data Lake Into an Empathetic Processor

Charles Herring 22 April 2026
Huggingface Dataset
Earlier this week, WitFoo and the University of Canterbury released 100 million labelled cybersecurity records to Hugging Face under Apache 2.0. Here's a three-prompt walk-through for putting it to work in a stack you already own (Grafana, Sentinel, Splunk, Elastic), using Empathetic Processing to translate, detect, and visualise across your own data.

Blaster, Mythos, and the Patching Tempo We're About to Need

Charles Herring 8 April 2026
Digital Storm
In 2003 at the Naval Postgraduate School, the Blaster worm taught me hard lessons about patch windows, perimeter assumptions, and the laptops that walk in from outside. With Anthropic's release of Mythos, we're about to relive a version of that August, compressed and supercharged. Here's the guidance I gave my team and what I wish I'd known in Monterey.

The Nuclear Code Fork

Charles Herring 30 March 2026
Submarine Control Room
We killed all 450 external dependencies in our analytics platform and brought every line of code in house. It took two days, ~305K tokens, and uncovered 14 vulnerabilities that were already sitting in our stack. Here's why we did it, what we found, and what it actually cost.

GrrCON 2024 - Birthing Perjury-free AI

Charles Herring 23 September 2024
GrrCON

Abstract

Cybersecurity analysis leading to deterrence of cybercrime requires processing thousands to billions of digital signals per second. Those signals must be accurately comprehended, forensically preserved then used to detect and investigate potential cybercrime. The work products must not only assist the investigators but must be translated into language that non-technical lay audiences including judges, lawyers and jurors can understand.

This presentation explores how generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), natural language processing (NLP), graph-theory and artificial narrow intelligence (ANI) can play a role in delivering these outcomes.

The session includes demonstrations of opensource toolkits, datasets and models designed to assist in this work.

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