CyberSQUAD Berlin 2025

Ashkan Vila is the SOC Manager for the DACH region with Eye Security. Hunting and researching Threat Actors with a background in Threat Intelligence and Incident Management, he now focuses on keeping the backbone of our society safe.

Michael de Klein is the SOC Manager for the Benelux region at Eye Security, leading teams that detect and stop cyber threats every single day. With years of hands-on experience in Pentesting and Managed Detection & Response, he knows exactly what it takes to get into organizations, and how to keep them safe.

Natalia Krapiva is a Senior Tech-Legal Counsel at Access Now. She leads Access Now’s efforts to strategically engage courts and legal processes to uphold digital rights and works with Access Now’s Digital Security Helpline to investigate state-sponsored digital attacks against civil society, including spyware and phishing.

Jannes Quer is a security consultant at Security Research Labs with over four years of consulting experience. Before joining Security Research Labs, he worked as a researcher at Freie Universität Berlin and EPFL Lausanne, where he connected the fields of molecular dynamics and reinforcement learning. Jannes has given several talks, including presentations at the Chaos Communication Congress and the Heise Security Tour.

Paul Zenker is a hacker at heart, fascinated by how technology can be used in ways its inventors never intended. At KPMG he helps clients implement AI projects securely, ensuring that innovation doesn’t come at the expense of safety.

Giulia Vaccaro is Head of Threat Intelligence at Valantic Management Consulting. Through her past life as an ethical hacker she is an expert in understanding and utilizing the mindset and attack patterns of cyber crime actors. Through Open Source Intelligence in Deep and Darknet Sources she helps clients understand their threat landscape and uncovers leaked data that nobody else has found.

David Backovsky is a Senior Consultant at Bureau Veritas Cybersecurity, specializing in product security evaluation and advisory services. With a background that spans cybersecurity, research, and defense, he blends deep technical know-how with a forward-looking approach. Passionate about product security, David works closely with clients as an expert partner, guiding them through the challenges of emerging regulations and ever-evolving threats.

Dr.  Klaus Kursawe earned his PhD in 2001 from the University of Saarbrücken in collaboration with IBM Research Zurich, working on securely distributing services over unreliable networks. Following his doctorate, and before that topic became popular thanks to Bitcoin, he continued at IBM until 2003 with a focus on Trusted Computing, and later held positions at Philips, KU Leuven, and Radboud University as well as several Startups, where he further honed applied security research.

As co-founder and Chief Scientist of the European Network for Cyber Security (ENCS), Dr. Kursawe helped shape cybersecurity strategies for grid operators and national authorities across Europe, occasionally convincing engineers and policy-makers to agree on the same definition of “secure.” He has served on multiple international expert groups and contributed to research projects aimed at keeping the lights on and the turbines spinning.

More recently, he joined DNV, working primarily on training for the energy and industrial sectors, now also working on new challenges such as the energy transition and the impact of geopolitical events  on the security of critical infrastructures.