Spring 2026

AI Agents at the Frontlines of Cybersecurity

Thursday, June 4, 2026 at 4:30pm (SPECIAL DATE)
Shriram 108

Speaker: Abe Starosta

Abe Starosta leads AI for Security at Microsoft, where he builds AI agents for both offensive and defensive cybersecurity, with a current focus on offensive security. Before Microsoft, Abe worked at Splunk and spent much of his career in startups, including Primer.ai, Human Capital (which he co-founded), and Livongo. He earned both his B.S. (Class of 2016) and M.S. in Computer Science from Stanford University, and remains passionate about the intersection of AI, cybersecurity, and entrepreneurship.

Applied Cyber End of Year Barbecue

Sunday, May 31, 2026 at 1:00pm
Mirrielees Courtyard

Applied Cyber will also be having our end of the year BBQ celebration this Sunday 5/31 at 1 PM in the Mirrielees courtyard! We will have vegetarian options. Hope to see you there!

To find the courtyard, head to the following location on the map and walk right behind Mirrielees to the BBQ area: https://maps.app.goo.gl/GLvKWNXqVXtpnq946

Pandora: A Next Generation Adversary Emulation Framework

Friday, May 29, 2026 at 4:30pm
Shriram 108

Unleash Pandora’s box upon the world! Learn about cutting edge offensive security and persistence techniques from a newly built from scratch adversary emulation framework (malware toolkit). Understand the complex networking, systems, and design principles underlying modern malware and espionage toolkits.

Speaker: Cody Ho

Cody Ho is a founder, MLE, and tooling lead on our CCDC team. His security related work focuses on the intersection of AI systems and understanding how AI affects both offensive and defensive security research. He has previously worked for Apple and OpenAI and won first place at the inaugural DEFCON AI CTF.

Once Upon a free(); What They Don’t Tell You in CS 107

Friday, May 22, 2026 at 3:30pm (Special time and location!)
Y2E2 335

Join us this Friday at 3:30pm!
In CS 107, you implement a heap allocator. But how are they implemented in the real world? What can go so horribly wrong when you misuse it? And how does that have real-world effects?

Speaker: Ethan Ho

Ethan is a member of Stanford’s CCDC and CPTC teams and a player on the U.S. Cyber Team.

Women in Applied Cyber (WAC) Meeting

Monday , May 18, 2026 at 5:00pm
Women’s Community Center

Come join us for a Women in Applied Cyber meeting! Discover ways to get involved, enjoy pizza and drinks, and play some cybersecurity-themed games (with prizes!).

Hacking the Mind: Adversarial Attacks on Brainwave Authentication Systems

Friday, May 15, 2026 at 4:30pm
Shriram 108

EEG-based authentication promises a future where identity is verified through brainwave signals: internal, continuous, and uniquely human. But we show that these systems are not automatically secure. Even models with high accuracy can be fooled by tiny perturbations to EEG signals, causing the system to misidentify one person as another. This talk examines EEG biometrics from both the attacker’s and defender’s perspective: how these systems work, how adversarial machine learning can break them, and how we might secure neural data before it becomes the next major biometric attack surface.

Speakers: Michael Thompson, Eugenio Ramirez, Joseph Bae

Michael Thompson, Eugenio Ramirez, and Joseph Bae are senior Computer Science students at SFSU with backgrounds in cybersecurity, computer science education, and AI/ML research.

Cyber Supply Chain Risk with Rob Beckett, nDiligence

Friday, May 8, 2026 at 4:30pm
Shriram 108

Join us for a fascinating and terrifying examination of the global cyber supply chain – the most complex and interdependent digital ecosystem in the world.

Speaker: Rob Beckett

Rob commands broad expertise in decision sciences, cognitive research, and cyber intelligence to help government agencies, partner nations, and the commercial sector perform informed analysis of risk at scale.

From Zero to Compromise: Hacking Workshop

Friday, May 1, 2026 at 4:30pm
Shriram 108

Join us this Friday for a hands-on workshop that simulates a multi-stage cyber attack! At each step, you’ll follow the attacker’s path to see how the same vulnerability led to real-world data breaches.

Speaker: Joey Holtzman

Joey Holtzman is a junior studying computer science with a focus on systems. He is the president of Applied Cyber and is on both the CPTC and CCDC teams. Additionally, he has previously worked as a security engineer at Praetorian and holds the OSCP certification. Outside of security, Joey likes to jump rope, go on bike rides, and study history.

Ignore All Previous Instructions… (Prompt Injection Workshop)

Friday, April 24, 2026 at 4:30pm
Shriram 108

This Friday, Ashley will be leading a workshop centered around AI systems and Prompt Injections. Join us to hack some chatbots and give a warm welcome to the admits!!

Speaker: Ashley Dai

Ashley is a Coterm student in Computer Science with a concentration in computer and network security. She is the Vice President of Applied Cyber and has previously served as the Women in Applied Cyber lead. Ashley has worked with companies including Box, the Stanford Internet Observatory, and SquareX, and is a DEF CON Black Badge recipient. In her free time, she enjoys hacking, building software for social connection, playing volleyball, dancing, and solving logic puzzles.

ENI6MA: Post-Credential Security and the Ephemeral Witness Paradigm

Friday, April 17, 2026 at 4:30pm
Shriram 108

Join us for a discussion on the future of cybersecurity with Frank Dylan Rosario, founder of Rosario Cybernetics and leader of ENI6MA, and Dr. Lin Wang, ENI6MA co-inventor. Together, they will explore how ephemeral, context-bound identity systems could replace reusable credentials and reshape zero-trust security, AI agents, and post-quantum threats.

Speaker: Frank Dylan Rosario

Mr. Rosario is a systems architect and researcher with 25+ years in high-performance computing, global product delivery, and trust economics. Reviewer-visible experience includes supercomputing and subsequent work in financial technology and mixed reality, alum from IBM, Oracle, and the team that deployed 3 billion production Ai agents (Bixby) at Samsung Research.

He founded Rosario Cybernetics and leads ENI6MA, oriented toward digital trust rooted in pragmatic mathematical primitives: clear assumptions, bounded disclosure, and verification that does not depend on hoarding reusable secrets, treating identity and authorization as context-bound demonstration rather than portable credentials that outlive their intent.

His research thesis includes the Rosario–Wang Proof framing and work on perception, action, and constraint in advanced systems. Public profiles: Google Scholar · GitHub (soltrinox) · Linktree · rosariocyber.com

Speaker: Dr. Lin Wang

Dr. Lin Wang holds a Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering (Duke University, 2013) and has 10+ years building production machine-learning systems from research through deployment. Quantified credentials include three patents, multiple invention disclosures, 16 publications, and 12 international conference presentations. At Samsung Research America he was twice a Samsung Top 10 Innovation Finalist, contributed patents and publications, and transferred Ph.D.-era signal-processing research into Samsung’s embedded stack, including millimeter-wave radar micro-Doppler; his technical scope spans scalable recommendation and ranking, deep learning (ingestion through online inference), embedded and sensing ML, and voice-, vision-, and robotics-related ML.

He has served in principal-level architecture roles for large-scale recommender systems at Liftoff / Vungle / JetFuel, with measurable engagement and retention outcomes, and has led ML for NVU-style perception and related product surfaces.

He is a co-inventor of ENI6MA and has collaborated with Frank Rosario for over 10 years; the Rosario–Wang Proof line encodes joint emphasis on rigorous foundations under real-world scale, adversaries, and product pressure. Profiles: GitHub (orchestor) · eni6ma.net

Estonia - Scaling Cyber Capacity Worldwide

Friday, April 3, 2026 at 4:30pm
Shriram 108

Join us for a conversation with Merle Maigre on how Estonia is helping scale cyber capacity worldwide, drawing on experience across Ukraine, Moldova, the Western Balkans, and Central Asia. She’ll share practitioner-driven insights on cyber policy, institution-building, and real-world cyber preparedness from one of the world’s leading voices in cybersecurity strategy.

Speaker: Merle Maigre

Currently as a short-term visiting scholar at CISAC Stanford, Merle has been leading the cyber programme at e-Governance Academy in Estonia. She’s become involved with cyber from a strategic government perspective, where she used to work, most recently as the Director of the NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence in Tallinn, before that as the Security Policy Advisor to the President of Estonia, and earlier as an analyst at the Policy Planning Unit at NATO SecGen’s Private Office.