Modern Cybersecurity Failures: Skills and Misconfigurations That Define the Battlefield
Modern cybersecurity failures are rarely about zero-days — they are about persistent misconfigurations and skills gaps that attackers continue to exploit. Even the best technology, when misconfigured or underutilized, becomes an opportunity rather than a defense.
The cybersecurity landscape has become something of a battlefield, where outcomes depend less on advanced exploits and more on fundamental skills and everyday weaknesses. Attackers thrive on “connect-the-dots” opportunities — chaining together weak identity configurations, privilege mismanagement, and operational oversights to achieve compromise.
Drawing on extensive Paula’s experience from real-world incident response and penetration testing engagements, this session examines why these failures persist and how they shape breaches across enterprise and cloud environments. Attendees will learn which skills truly matter in defending against modern threats, the misconfigurations most often overlooked, and how to shift from chasing buzzwords to building strategies that meaningfully raise the level of protection. Super practical!
About the speaker
Paula Januszkiewicz
Paula Januszkiewicz is the Founder and CEO of CQURE and CQURE Academy, companies she established back in 2008. She is also an Enterprise Security MVP, honorable Microsoft Regional Director, and a world-class cybersecurity expert, consulting Customers worldwide. In 2017, Paula graduated from Harvard Business School. She delivers keynotes and sessions at the biggest world conferences such as RSA, Black Hat, Microsoft Ignite, SecTor Canada, Australian Cyber Conference, GISEC, GITEX, LEAP, and many others. She is often a top-rated speaker, including being chosen as the No. 1 Speaker at Microsoft Ignite (among 1,100 speakers at a conference with 26,000 attendees) and at Black Hat Asia 2019. At the RSA Conference, two of her sessions were among the top 5 best rated. Paula is known for her unique stage presence that is always well-received among diverse audiences, often gathering thousands of people!
Paula has over 19 years of experience in the cybersecurity field, performing penetration tests, architecture consulting, trainings, and seminars. Every year, she takes over 200 flights to provide cybersecurity services for CQURE’s Customers. Paula and her Team also design security awareness programs for various organizations, including awareness sessions for top management. Together, they create various security tools (CQTools) supporting penetration tests, incident response, and forensics, which are shared with the community. Paula is a member of the Technical Advisory Board at the Royal Bank of Scotland/Natwest. And to top it all off, she has access to the source code of Windows!