Keynote
Lance James
BSides NYC 2023 (0x04) · Day 1 · Keynote
In his compelling keynote at BSides NYC, Lance James, CEO of Unit 221B, delivered a provocative and insightful critique of the conventional cybersecurity landscape, urging the community to "reboot" its approach to emergent threats. James argues that the industry is trapped in an "emerging threats algorithm" – a cyclical, reactive pattern of identifying new threats, failing to solve old ones, and then adding more to an ever-growing list, often relying on vendor solutions that may not fundamentally address the core problem. This systemic complacency, he contends, is the true "emerging threat."
AI review
Lance James brings genuine credentials and a clever core idea — using ransomware's own file-access patterns to snapshot before encryption — but the talk stays at the level of a well-argued blog post. The ransomware FUSE proof-of-concept is interesting, but the framing around AI, disruptive thinking, and industry behavior burns too much runtime on motivational scaffolding that the audience already knows.