headlining speakers
Sara Ricci
Sara is an internationally sought after speaker, mentor and C-suite advisor with proven expertise in Risk Management and Technology enablement in highly regulated financial and energy sectors, information technology services and retail. She specializes in global leadership of strategic initiatives in Enterprise Risk, Resilience, Operational Risk, IT Risk/Information Security, including Cybersecurity and Third Party Risk Management.
Her role as Global Head of Oversight and Control, Strategic Sourcing at JPMorgan Chase followed similar, wide ranging and impactful positions at Citi, Bank of America and UBS. Sara also leverages experience as Head of Information Risk Governance and Resilience at HBC and executive roles at HCL Technologies and New York Power Authority. She helped develop guidance for the financial and energy sectors, including maturity models in Resilience and Cybersecurity, whitepapers and benchmarking studies in Risk Appetite and Resilience.
Brad Tywham
conference MC
Belinda Heggen
FLUENT Media founder Belinda Heggen is one of Australia’s most experienced and well-respected media and presentation trainers and an in-demand corporate MC.
With more than 25 years’ experience as a journalist and news presenter across TV, radio and print, and as a media strategist and advisor to senior politicians, she specialises in developing confident and inspiring leaders who seek to build their profile and elevate their business brand through strategic communication.
John Dryden
John is a Senior Cybersecurity Consultant with Phriendly Phishing, where he partners with Australian organisations to build human cyber resilience through practical, people-focused approaches to cyber security, artificial intelligence and behavioural change.
John is committed to helping businesses transform their employees into confident and capable cyber defenders. He holds qualifications in Applied Science, Arts (Psychology), Cyber Security and Artificial Intelligence, including a Master of Cyber Security specialising in Technical Analysis.
George Coldham
George is a Cloud Solution Architect at Microsoft, working with enterprise and public-sector organisations to design and operate secure cloud and identity architectures at scale.
His work focuses on Zero Trust, identity as the modern security control plane, and the practical realities of securing SaaS, cloud platforms, and emerging AI systems in complex environments. George specialises in helping organisations reduce real-world risk without undermining productivity or user experience.
Alongside his technical role, George is an experienced international speaker, educator, and community organiser. He regularly presents at industry conferences, bootcamps, and meetups, translating complex security concepts into practical guidance for practitioners and decision-makers. George is the founder of Global Security Community, the lead organiser of the Perth Microsoft Security Meetup, and an organiser within the global AI and developer community. He brings a practitioner-led, evidence-based perspective to his talks, drawing on real customer scenarios rather than vendor theory or marketing narratives.
His speaking topics include Zero Trust beyond the marketing slides, identity-driven security, cloud and SaaS security in practice, and designing security architectures for humans as well as systems.
Serena King
Serena brings more than 30 years of experience across federal and state government, as well as the private sector. During her 14 years with the Department of Home Affairs, she has held a diverse range of roles spanning investigations, compliance, border intelligence, community and industry engagement, and cyber security.
In her current role with the National Office of Cyber Security (NOCS), Serena works to strengthen government-industry partnerships, with a particular focus on supporting small and medium businesses and critical infrastructure supply chains, while advancing the objectives of Australia’s 2023-2030 Cyber Security Strategy.
Scott Lawton
Scott is the Founder and CEO of IT Integrity and a Non-Executive Director on an NFP Board, bringing over 25 years of experience at the intersection of technology, governance, risk, compliance, and security. He has led award-winning digital transformation initiatives that strengthen service delivery, improve operational efficiency, and drive sector innovation, particularly within highly regulated environments.
Scott is known for his pragmatic approach to aligning technology with governance frameworks, helping organisations manage risk, enhance security, meet compliance obligations, and make confident decisions in an evolving digital landscape.
Tara Lie
Tara is a cyber security GRC professional, with experience across private sector, public sector, and non-profits. She combines her background in mathematics with her experience in governance, risk, and compliance to share expertise on post-quantum cryptography and strategies for quantum resilience.
Tara regularly speaks at cyber security, quantum, and governance events, with recent highlights including the 2025 Elevating Quantum Women's Voices program (Sydney), 2026 CISO conferences (Perth, Canberra), 2026 Governance and Risk Management Forum (Perth), 2026 Black Swan Summit (Perth), and 2026 International Women's Day Cyber Sector Forum (Perth).
Tara is the Information & Technology Governance Manager at the Department of Water and Environmental Regulation, and is a PhD Candidate at Edith Cowan University. Her research aims to bring Australian context into global PQC discussions, and to assist preparedness efforts for quantum-enabled cyber security threats.
Shane Moffitt
Shane is the Principal of SHM Advisory, a Melbourne based boutique cybersecurity consultancy specialising in Australian government and defence clients.
He works across Cyber strategy, IRAP assessments, Essential Eight uplift, ISO 27001, penetration testing and executive cyber governance training.
Shane brings a rare mix of practitioner and regulator experience. He has held roles as Deputy CISO of the Victorian Government, where he was responsible for deploying security awareness training to 346,000 staff across the Victorian public sector, and as the Oceania Lead for ISO 27001 at EY.
He has been an ASD accredited IRAP Assessor since 2016, holds CISSP and ISO 27001 Lead Auditor certifications, and an MBA in Computing. Shane brings a strong strategic lens to enterprise cyber risk management and was the lead author of the current Victorian cyber strategy.
Having personally run one of the largest security awareness programs in the country, Shane has a firsthand view of what these programs actually deliver, and where they fall short. His PerthSEC session draws on that experience to challenge the industry's continued reliance on annual training modules and phishing simulations as a primary control, and to argue for a fundamentally different approach to managing human risk.
Shane is a regular commentator on cyber governance and risk, and works with boards, executives and government agencies across Australia to translate security strategy into practical, defensible action.ans as well as systems.
Alex Nehmy
Alex has specialised in cyber security for the past 25 years and is a Fellow of the Australian Information Security Association.
Alex has consulted nationally and internationally across the public and private sectors, and has built cyber security capabilities for both higher education and critical infrastructure organisations. Notably, he has brought IT and Operational Technology groups together to secure electricity grid environments. Alex has also served as CISO for a major Australian defence organisation.
Prior to joining Dragos, Alex held Field CTO and Field CSO roles focused on industrial and OT security at leading cybersecurity vendors.
Dr Katie Paxton-Fear
Katie is an ethical hacker, security researcher, and Security Advocate at Semgrep, where she works with engineering and security teams to find and fix vulnerabilities before attackers do.
Her PhD is in natural language processing and cyber security, and her academic research covered threats to emerging technology, from AI systems to robotics, work funded in part by the UK government and published in peer-reviewed journals.
Katie is also the creator of InsiderPhD, a YouTube channel with a following of nearly 100,000 aspiring hackers, where she has published dozens of tutorials on bug bounty methodology, testing, tooling, and note-taking. Teaching runs through everything she does: she has delivered training to some of the world's largest organisations and consistently argues that security knowledge should not be gatekept behind expensive certifications or years of experience.
She speaks regularly at conferences worldwide, including RSA, AWS Summit London, and Mobile World Congress. Her talks tend to combine live technical demonstrations with an unusually candid account of what actually goes wrong in production, and why the same bugs keep coming back.
Rodman Ramezanian
Rodman is a strategic cyber security leader supporting Australia’s Federal Government and Defence organisations as they modernise and secure their cloud environments. He works closely with agencies and senior stakeholders to uncover and manage risk, improve visibility, and enable the safe, rapid adoption of cloud technologies across critical systems.
Renowned for his ability to communicate complex security concepts with clarity and impact, Rodman bridges technical depth with executive strategy. His expertise spans cloud security, governance, and risk management, helping organisations strengthen assurance and resilience in increasingly dynamic, multi-cloud environments.
As an ASD-endorsed IRAP Assessor, Rodman brings deep understanding of compliance and assurance frameworks within government contexts. He holds multiple professional accreditations including CISSP, CCSP, CISA, CDPSE, CCISO, Google Professional Cloud Architect, AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate, Microsoft Azure Solutions Architect and AI Engineer, and MITRE ATT&CK certifications.
Rodman is passionate about advancing Australia’s cyber resilience, he thrives on empowering public sector leaders to innovate securely and confidently in the cloud era.
Philip Ramesh
Philip is Manager, Information Security at South Metropolitan Health Service (SMHS), bringing more than 20 years of experience in ICT and information security, including over a decade in the healthcare sector. He has led initiatives in cyber resilience, governance, risk management, compliance, and digital transformation.
Philip also serves as a Board Member of Folsi.org.au, a not-for-profit, and is passionate about advancing secure, trusted, and innovative approaches to cyber security, privacy, and information sharing.odman is a strategic cyber security leader supporting Australia’s Federal Govrnment and Defence organisations as they modernise and secure their cloud environments.
He works closely with agencies and senior stakeholders to uncover and manage risk, improve visibility, and enable the safe, rapid adoption of cloud technologies across critical systems.
Rajiv Shah
Rajiv is a technology and business adviser, helping organisations to understand emerging technology, and to apply it in a way that is both secure and delivers business value. He has a PhD in quantum physics, and almost 30 years of experience in cyber security, working for government and commercial clients across the globe.
He was the inaugural Australian country director for BAE Systems cyber security business, and his work has spanned cyber security strategy and architecture, big data and artificial intelligence, quantum technology and advanced communication systems and networks.
Rajiv is the Managing Director of MDR Quantum, helping clients to prepare for the risks and opportunities of the quantum age. In addition, he is a Fellow of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, an adviser to CAN.B Group and a member of the board of the Australian Information Security Association and various other boards.