The following is a post by Mark Barwinski, the opening keynote speaker for Swiss Cyber Storm 2025. Mark has over 20 years of cybersecurity leadership experience spanning financial services, professional consulting, manufacturing, and government intelligence. In this blog post, he shares first-hand experiences of OPSEC failures from his time at the NSA, and offers strong advice for realistic OPSEC practices in 2025. By publishing this article for the first time, Swiss Cyber Storm hopes to provide a basis for further discussion.

Since the US election, the whole world seems to be descending into chaos.

Artificial intelligence as a topic may seem hardly original and the number one buzzword everywhere. But it would be negligent not to make the tension between AI and cybersecurity the focus of this year’s Swiss Cyber Storm. Our motto “The AI Revolution” reflects the reality that AI is shaping the security world anew – let’s take the bull by the horns and go straight at it!

This year, Swiss Cyber Storm celebrate its anniversary: On October 24 in the Kursaal Bern, the tenth edition of the Swiss Cyber Storm conference will take place since the founding of the independent supporting association. The first conference of this name was held in Rapperswil back in 2010, but at that time still under the umbrella of Compass Security.

Believe it or not, but back in December, we decided to make E-Health our focus theme for Swiss Cyber Storm 2020. So when the Covid-19 crisis slowly approached, we padded our shoulders and thought that our gut feeling had been right on target again.

Engaging in Penetration Testers to gauge the security of existing online services has become a standard practice in our industry in Switzerland. Established services and new offerings are tested alike in order to uncover hidden bugs or to raise awareness of security problems that often go unnoticed with management or developers.