Sarah Fluchs is the CTO of admeritia, which specialises in security consulting for the process industry, manufacturing, and critical infrastructures. Prior to her current role, Sarah has developed cybersecurity guidance for the water sector at the German Federal Office for Information Security (BSI).
A process and automation engineer herself; Sarah works on creating security engineering methods that help engineers make informed, conscious security decisions they can truly stand behind – and communicate convincingly.
Sarah has created the Top 20 Secure PLC Coding practices with Dale Peterson, Jake Brodsky and Vivek Ponnada, led a government-funded research project on security by design for ICS, and is the ISA Co-Convenor for revising the ISA/IEC 62443-3-2 standard. As of 2024, she succeeds Joe Weiss as a Co-Managing Director for ISA99.
Simon has 38+ years of experience in information technology and cyber security across the software, financial services, and energy sectors. He spent 18 years working for bp in a variety of global roles, including the Group Chief Information Security Officer and VP of Global Infrastructure.
Simon now combines advisory and executive roles for several organisations, including Semperis, Onyxia, Performanta and E&Y.
He has been recognised for his advocacy of diversity and inclusion with several nominations for a top Corporate Ally.
Simon has served as an advisor to NHS Digital and Natural History Museum on cyber security.
Brian Holliday is a member of the Executive Management Board of Siemens plc and Managing Director for Siemens Digital Industries, which serves the manufacturing and infrastructure sectors. He is also Chairman of Siemens Industry Software UK.
He is a supervisory board member for the High Value Manufacturing Catapult in addition to being a main board member for Make UK, the Manufacturers’ Organisation and in 2022 was appointed co-chair of Made Smarter, the national digitalisation movement to drive productivity, growth and sustainability in manufacturing.
A Chartered Engineer and Fellow of the Institution of Engineering and Technology, Brian started his career with Texas Instruments and went on to read Computer Systems at Cardiff University before joining Siemens, the global leader in electrification, automation and digitalisation in 1993.
He attained his Executive MBA at Manchester Business School in 2000 and in 2014 became a graduate of the CBI’s Executive Leadership Programme.
Brian was made a Fellow of The Royal Academy of Engineering in September 2022.
Rob Barnes has been providing specialist cyber security expertise to Rolls-Royce Civil Nuclear UK, its clients, and the Rolls-Royce Small Modular Reactor (SMR) programme since 2017. Prior to that, Barnes worked within the defence area of the business as an Information Assurance (IA) technical lead. Before joining Rolls-Royce, he spent eight years working for Dstl, a part of the UK Ministry of Defence.
Cassie Crossley, Vice President, Supply Chain Security in the global Cybersecurity & Product Security Office at Schneider Electric, is an experienced cybersecurity technology executive in Information Technology and Product Development and author of Software Supply Chain Security: Securing the End‐to‐End Supply Chain for Software, Firmware, and Hardware. She has many years of business and technical leadership experience in supply chain security, cybersecurity, product/application security, software/firmware development, program management, and data privacy.
Mohammed established Cyber ICS in UK in 2018 in response to the new NIS regulations that were introduced across EU. He headed up a new cyber regulatory function for UK’s Office for gas and electricity markets (OFGEM), and brokered relationships across lead government departments, Health and Safety Executive, UK’s National Cyber Security Centre, and the Centre for Protection of National Infrastructure. He influenced government policy and direction for the sector and in doing so wrote the NIS guidance and NIS inspection framework in a collaborative fashion with operators. Further Mohammed wrote the RIIO2 cyber resilience methodology, which is the main instrument to providing funding for the sector by working with senior leadership, boards, and challenge groups.
Mohammed comes from a big 4 background, having built the SCADA consultancy practice whilst at Deloitte UK in 2009. He worked for Qatar Petroleum as head of Security Strategy and became the acting CSO from the onset of the Shamoon attack which affected one of the major subsidiaries. He was deputised as Sector Authority for all industry operators, established a Cyber Security Partnership Forum, performed industry risks and compliance assessments, maturity and capability assessments, and made recommendations to boards to improve the security posture and also enable digital transformation.
Mohammed led the ICS security consultancy at GE, based in Dubai, which was previously an independent boutique known as Wulrdtech. During his tenure, he helped develop regulatory instruments and then led teams to perform assessments against Critical National Infrastructure Operators. He conducted several holistic risk and compliance assessments, writing treatment options, ICS improvement tactical roadmaps and multi-year strategies with maturity capabilities.
With Mohammed’s background from big 4 consultancy, a major oil and gas operator, a major OT vendor and having worked with the EU commission and heading up a cyber regulatory function in UK, he not only provides the compliance view, but also the organisational and national risk and opportunities view, to formulate well balanced recommendations, from a technical, management and organisational perspective from an operational, tactical, and strategic viewpoint.
Mohammed has a master’s degree in information security from the prestigious Royal Holloway University, holds ICS security certifications SANS GICSP and SANS GRID, ISO 27001 lead auditor, ISO 27001 lead implementer, SABSA, TOGAF, CISSP, CISM, Certified ethical hacker, amongst various others.
Mohammed is a member of the World Economic Forum and has contributed towards working groups such as Quantum Cryptography, Cyber Resilience in Oil and Gas, and Cyber Resilience in Electricity. He is a member of CIGRE working group, regularly presents and co-chairs events at the IET in the UK. He previously advised NARUC on their regulatory approach for Cyber, and provided feedback and commentary for the EU commission, ACER, and ENTSO-E in the development of the network code for cyber security.
Carlos Montes Portela received a B.Sc. degree in Software Engineering and a M.Sc. degree in Business Process Management and IT (cum laude). His master thesis focused on the design space of the ICT architecture of the Smart Grid taking into account security and privacy issues.
Carlos has over 25 years of experience in different roles: software engineer, technical and functional designer, IT architect, EAI/SOA architect, team leader, senior smart grid innovator and senior OT security officer.
Currently, Carlos is an independent business owner. Form his company Dicarma he offers coaching, training and consulting services on cybersecurity related topics. As a TOGAF, CISSP and CISM certified OT Security Manager, Carlos is currently contracted by a Dutch DSO where he is responsible for OT ISO-27001 and ISA/IEC-62443 based ISMS. Carlos also researches the applicability of the ISA/IEC 62443 standards for charging infrastructures for electric vehicles for an association related to EV charging. Furthermore, Carlos is an active member of the Dutch standardization committee NEC65 and WG10 of TC65 at the IEC where the IEC-62443 standards are developed. Carlos is also an informative member of the ISA-99 committee. He conducts training courses for ISA-Europe in the Dutch, English and Spanish languages. Carlos is a Certified Trainer and Subject Matter Expert for the ISA/IEC62443 training program.
A leader and critical thinker in the field of OT cybersecurity with 16 years of experience. He acquired Bachelor of Engineering in 2005. He managed military IT/ OT infrastructure at Indian Navy for the first 10 years of career. He leads the Global Cyber Security Pentest Lab, Schneider Electric at Bangalore, India as Lab Manager for 3 + years. Exposed to rich experience of handling pentest of 300+ critical ICS products i.e., PLCs, Safety devices, RTUs, Historians, smart metres, and associated applications. Gained effective practical experience in MITRE ATT&CK, IEC 62443-4-1, IEC 62443-4-2, and OT pentest environment.
He possesses certifications like ISA 62443 Cybersecurity Expert, CISSP, CISM, GPEN, GICSP, ISO 27001:2013 LA and AWS Security. He is passionate about IT-OT convergence and attack surfaces exposed in such engineering. He continues to pursue offensive security at his home lab during his free time endeavour. He started a OT Cybersecurity startup ‘SECOT PVT Ltd’. It got very quick success in bagging projects in middle east (RA of 120 electric substations and few more in oil & gas). During his tenure, he practiced IEC 62443-2-X series as a service provider for asset owners.
He joined Siemens Energy at Erlangen, Germany to contribute to the cybersecurity of Grid Automation Technologies for electrical utilities. Prashanth contributed to strategic decisions for OT cybersecurity in the digitalisation journey of GAT, Siemens Energy. Interacted with many of the important Energy companies in Europe, Middle East, and US. He practiced NERC-CIP, IEC 62443-3-2, IEC 62443-3-3, local regulations, NIST CSF during this role.
He is currently working with SKF Group and contributes to formulating OT cybersecurity strategy, policy, governance, processes, including IT-OT convergence for 100+ manufacturing factories across the globe.
Sean McBride is the Director of the Informatics Research Institute at Idaho State University, where, since 2017 he has developed the nation’s only hands-on Industrial Cybersecurity degree program.
Sean holds a PhD from LaTrobe University (Australia), a Masters of Global Management from Thunderbird/Arizona State University, and a Masters of Business Administration from Idaho State University.
JC Herz is Exiger’s SVP of Cyber Supply Chain, which delivers product-level risk and assurance of software and cyber-physical devices, including Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) analysis and generation of SBOMs from firmware binaries. She was the co-founder and CEO of Ion Channel, a software supply chain analytics platform Exiger acquired in 2023, and is a fellow at George Mason University’s National Security Institute.
591 Signals Unit, Royal Air Force
Carolyn J. Swinney received the B.Eng. and M.Sc. degrees (Hons.) in electronics engineering from the University of Essex, Colchester, U.K., in 2007 and 2013, respectively, where she is currently pursuing the Ph.D. degree in electronic systems engineering. She graduated as a Communications and Electronics Engineering Officer at the Royal Air Force in 2014. Her main research interests are signal processing, unmanned aerial vehicles, neural networks, machine learning, and cyber security.
Ivan oversees the Communication direction and the strategy to promote the cybersecurity ecosystem at the Cybersecurity Agency of Catalonia. In the last 8 years he has been dedicated professionally to the public administration sphere, initially in the field of communication and in recent times as responsible for planning, supervising and directing the teams of a political Cabinet as well as the coordination and collaboration with the technical teams that carry out the specific policies, both in the field of innovation, Technology and cybersecurity as areas of competence as well as the more specific areas of ordinary management (budgets, hiring, personnel management, planning, launching projects, etc.).
In the field of specific sectorial management, these last 8 years he has been focused on the management and supervision of the main digital transformation and digital innovation projects such as cybersecurity initiatives promoted from the public sphere in collaboration with private entities and companies, technology centers and the digital ecosystem from Catalonia, Spain but also European and international ones
Jack Duffield commissioned into the Royal Air Force in 2018. He has experience in cyber security and cyber threat intelligence, at the intersection between military aviation and defensive cyber operations.
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