InfoSec Hamilton Monthly Meetup for October 2026

NEW LOCATION ALERT!
This month, we are gathering at McMaster Innovation Park at 175 Longwood Road S.

Parking is free after 5pm.
Come in the front doors and walk through the main atrium area. We'll be on the ground floor, in the meeting rooms that are on the left hand side of the atrium.

6:30 - doors open
7pm - CSPM on a Shoestring w/ Don Mallory
8pm - intermission
8:15pm - Securing AI: From Emerging Risks to Real-World Defences w/ Todd Dow
9pm - wrap up

Session descriptions:
For October, you're getting 2 for 1! Don and Todd will be providing two great presentations for the group.

First, you'll be getting a first look at Don's upcoming HackFest talk entitled CSPM on a Shoestring:
CSPM is just a marketing term for configuration management aligned to standards-based controls validation of security baselines. As a result of the marketing hype, CSPM toolsets are often unreasonably priced, are limited in controls, scope, or flexibility.

We will explore the multitude of freely available tools for validation of various perspectives, align them to industry standard baselines such as those provided by CIS, CISA, ASD, and others against Microsoft cloud environments and discuss where they overlap or fail.

Attendees will leave with a toolkit of options based on real life testing in an enterprise environment. This will cover configuration drift, prioritise misconfigurations based on risk, options to automate evidence collection, and reporting without purchasing a dedicated CSPM platform.

Effective posture management is not about buying another dashboard, it is about treating cloud security as disciplined configuration management and continuously verifying that your environment remains aligned with established security baselines.

Then, for the second half of the evening, you'll be getting a deep dive into AI Security and what organizations are doing to protect AI from wreaking havoc.

AI is moving from experimentation to production faster than most organizations can secure it. This in-depth session will explore today’s AI security landscape—the emerging threats, attack patterns, risk categories, and governance challenges affecting AI applications and models—before examining how the broader security industry is working to make AI adoption safer. We’ll then connect those ideas to a real-world example, using Cisco AI Defense to demonstrate how emerging security approaches can be applied in practice. This is a technical and educational session - not a sales presentation - designed to give anyone building, adopting, or securing AI a clearer framework for understanding the risks and the controls available to manage them.

Your speakers:
Don & Todd - your regular co-hosts of InfoSec Hamilton.

Your co-hosts:
Todd Dow (LinkedIn) is a Cybersecurity Solutions Engineer focusing on AI Defense, Splunk XDR, Agentic AI & SOC Modernization at Cisco. He is also a writer (toddhdow.com), speaker and founder of InfoSec Hamilton. Todd has over 20 years of experience in the cybersecurity field performing penetration tests, providing security architecture and compliance consulting and creating, developing and leading high performing security teams – this included working as the CISO at two organizations: First Ontario Credit Union and ArcelorMittal Dofasco. Todd maintains CISSP, CISA and PMP credentials and he has also earned an Hon BA in Philosophy and Religious Studies from the University of Toronto.

Don Mallory (LinkedIn) has over 30 years of experience in enterprise IT, primarily in critical infrastructure, specializing in operations, data storage, disaster recovery, and security for critical infrastructure. Professionally, Don is a Senior Security Analyst in the healthcare sector. He is a co-author of “Applied Data Security Strategy - A Leader’s Guide”, and has been involved in various volunteer activities including C3X, Hak4Kidz Toronto, the Hamilton Infosec Meetup, and the Latow Photographer's Guild at the Art Gallery of Burlington, where he teaches traditional wet darkroom photography.