Picus Security Announces The Validation Summit ’26 Featuring Keynote Speaker Mikko Hyppönen
Virtual event will bring together cybersecurity leaders from a big fashion brand, the NFL and Atlassian to explore how
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SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 24, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Picus Security, a leading exposure validation company, today announced The Validation Summit ’26, a free virtual event bringing together cybersecurity leaders, practitioners and industry experts to examine how enterprises must rethink security validation as AI accelerates attacks and compresses the time defenders have to respond.
The two-hour summit will be broadcast on Oct. 14 at 1 p.m. ET for the Americas and Oct. 15 at 11 a.m. BST for EMEA and APAC.
AI is changing the economics of cyberattacks. Vulnerability discovery, exploit development and attack execution are becoming faster and increasingly automated, creating new challenges for security teams that rely on traditional assessment cycles. Through expert discussions and live demonstrations, the summit will explore what a validation program needs in order to deliver timely answers as threats and environments change.
Mikko Hyppönen, cybersecurity expert and author with three decades of experience, will deliver the opening keynote, “Three Decades in Security. This One Is Different.” Hyppönen will examine how AI changes attacker capabilities, why this shift challenges established security practices and what it means for enterprise readiness.
“No single validation approach can answer every question a security team faces,” said Volkan Erturk, co-founder and CTO of Picus Security. “Teams need to establish which exposures are exploitable, how far an attacker can progress and whether their controls will stop the attack. A validation program has to bring those answers together and keep them current. This summit will show how enterprises can build that program and use its evidence to decide what to fix.”
Following the keynote, Erturk will present “Security Testing in the AI Era.” He will discuss how adaptive validation programs combine exploitability validation, security control validation and agentic penetration testing. The session will explore how an agentic layer coordinates these approaches in response to new threats and environmental changes, bringing evidence together to guide remediation and verify fixes.
The summit will continue with “From Advisory to Answer: The Picus Platform, Live.” Hosted by Ron Eddings, founder of Hacker Valley Media, the session will follow a real-world scenario involving a CISA advisory linked to a new campaign by an Iranian state-sponsored actor. Attendees will see how security teams can quickly determine whether their defenses can stop the campaign’s techniques, identify the assets and attack paths most exposed, and prioritize remediation based on evidence, all demonstrated live in the Picus Platform.
The summit will conclude with a CISO Fireside Chat featuring:
- Alex San Miguel, head of information security at a big fashion brand
- Tomás Maldonado, CISO at the National Football League
- David B. Cross, CISO at Atlassian
The discussion will explore how security leaders are moving beyond severity-based prioritization toward evidence-based decisions built on exploitability, control validation and measurable risk reduction.
Join The Validation Summit ’26 to hear how leading security teams are adapting their validation strategies for an era of AI-driven attacks.
About Picus Security
Picus Security, a leading exposure validation company, proves what attackers can exploit and what your defenses stop, then closes real gaps with ready-to-deploy fixes and re-validates to confirm, at the machine speed today’s AI threats demand. The Picus Platform spans Breach and Attack Simulation, Autonomous Penetration Testing and Exposure Validation, unified by Picus Swarm, a swarm of AI agents that runs the whole validation loop continuously with human oversight. With 75+ integrations, it reaches across on-prem, hybrid cloud, and endpoint environments.
Trusted by many Fortune 500 enterprises, Picus was named a 2026 Gartner Peer Insights Customers’ Choice for Adversarial Exposure Validation and is recognized as an Innovation Leader in the Frost Radar for Automated Security Validation.
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Media Contact
Jennifer Tanner
Look Left Marketing
picus@lookleftmarketing.com
