Governors Square 15
When Ground Zero is your Kitchen Table
Cybersecurity in broadband is often framed as an external threat, but what happens when the breach originates from within? When the systems that run the network become the attack surface, the impact is immediate and existential: billing systems go dark, network maps disappear, construction halts, and operators lose visibility into their own infrastructure. The provider is not just degraded, it is effectively blind.
This session reframes cybersecurity for service providers through four critical lenses.
First, Protect This House: shifting from “if” to “when.” We examine practical strategies providers can implement to harden internal systems and reduce operational fragility, while also exploring the evolving role providers play in helping subscribers secure their own environments. This includes a candid look at liability boundaries and the growing patchwork of regulatory expectations surrounding end-user protection.
Second, Protect the Network: not all threats arrive as dramatic attacks. Many emerge as quiet, compounding drains on capacity. From botnets that weaponize thousands of endpoints into bandwidth-consuming swarms, to unauthorized communal streaming and edge compute misuse, we explore how everyday misuse and compromised applications can degrade network performance at scale and what providers can realistically do to detect and mitigate these threats.
Third, Protect the Protector: data centers have become the backbone of modern network operations and the industry’s latest buzzword, but their security posture is often assumed rather than verified. This session examines the real risks associated with both owned and third-party data centers, what happens when those environments are compromised, and how such events cascade across provider operations.
Finally, we bring it all together: how providers can build resilience across the systems they own, those they influence, and those they depend on but do not control.
This is not a theoretical discussion. It is a practical, operator-focused exploration of what happens when cybersecurity stops being abstract and becomes operational reality, when ground zero is not somewhere else, but your own kitchen table.
