Amanda Kollmorgan
Deputy State IT Director, WI Department of Military Affairs
Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, United States
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Amanda Kollmorgan is the Deputy State IT Director for the Wisconsin Department of Military Affairs. Amanda is passionate about developing people-first teams, mentoring future leaders, and fostering innovation through collaborative leadership. With nearly 20 years of military and civilian experience, she brings a well-rounded expertise in cybersecurity and IT strategy.
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Compliant and Compromised: Mapping the Gap Between Your Audit and Your Attacker
A clean audit and a successful breach are not contradictions; across NIS2, DORA, NIST, or CIS, they are frequently the same fiscal quarter at the same organization. This talk shows exactly where the paperwork and the adversary disagree, using evidence from environments where I both produce the compliance artifacts and run the defensive operations they describe.
We work through three control patterns that pass assessment while leaving attack paths open: account management that misses the stale service accounts enabling lateral movement, logging that meets retention requirements while nobody triages it, and configuration baselines that were true exactly once. Each is mapped to the ATT&CK techniques it fails to stop, and one gets a live demonstration: the control passes evidence collection on screen, then fails an atomic validation test sixty seconds later.
The back half is the fix: a threat-informed validation program a small team can run, with test cadence, evidence standards an adversary would respect, and the framing that keeps your auditors as allies. Attendees leave with the control-to-technique mapping and a starter test plan, regardless of which regulation is generating their paperwork.
Ctrl + Alt + Lead: Rebooting Cyber Culture with Human Skills
Coaching a junior analyst. Translating between the SOC and the C-suite. Holding a team together through an incident. These are cyber skills, even if they never show up on a certification track. This talk reboots how we think about cyber culture by treating leadership, communication, and mentorship as core infrastructure rather than nice-to-haves. As the field grows more complex, the technicians who carry the work forward are the ones who also grow into collaborators, trusted advisors, and leaders.
Ctrl + Alt + Lead: Rebooting Cyber Culture with Human Skills
Target audiences: Everyone
Takeaways: Attendees will learn practical ways to foster teambuilding, conflict resolution, psychological safety, build mentorship pipelines, and communicate with clarity under pressure.
Session Description: Technical skills might open doors in IT & Cybersecurity, but leadership, communication, and mentorship sustain growth and impact. As the field becomes more complex and critical, we must rethink how we build and lead teams. This talk highlights the soft skills that turn strong technicians into effective collaborators, trusted advisors, and emerging leaders: from coaching junior analysts to translating between the SOC and the C-suite.
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Amanda Kollmorgan
Deputy State IT Director, WI Department of Military Affairs
Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, United States
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