June TASK: Coercion, Insiders, and Cyber Trust
Join TASK this June for a practitioner-focused session on defending the human layer against manipulation and rethinking trust as a strategic tool in cybersecurity and crisis operations.
Live and in-person at TMU + Live-Streamed on Discord
Date: Wednesday, June 24th, 2026
Time: 6:00 PM
In-Person Location: DCC 208 Classroom at TMU's Daphne Cockwell Health Sciences Complex - 288 Church Street
Registration: Not required
Live-Stream: Although TASK is always best in-person, we will steam live again on Discord @ https://discord.gg/aXfY76xgVJ.
Topic: Weaponizing the Human Layer: How Coercion, Manipulation, and Psychological Warfare have Evolved the Insider Threat Playbook
Speaker: Lina Dabit
Cybersecurity incidents are evolving from technical exploits targeting organizations to psychological warfare and deeply personal campaigns focusing on executives and IT teams. Attackers are now blending social engineering, harassment, and blackmail to compromise employees who hold keys to critical systems. In this session, we’ll unpack how these schemes work, highlight real-world cases, and outline strategies organizations can use to detect, deter, and defend against insider threats driven by manipulation and coercion.
Lina Dabit has three decades of law enforcement leadership spanning frontline policing to national security, major and organized crime, protective operations and cybercrime. She has built and led teams tackling complex threats, both physical and digital, and worked at the intersection of intelligence, technology, and public safety. In the role of Executive Director, office of the CISO at Optiv Canada, Lina brings a mission-driven approach to cybersecurity. She builds on her past and present experiences to assist public and private enterprises plan, create and execute security strategies. Lina’s passion for innovation informs clients on proactive approaches to threat intelligence, third-party risk management and cross-functional security resilience.
Topic: Let's Talk About Trust
Speaker: Don Mallory
Trust is a word that is used in business and particularly across cybersecurity domains. This talk is a discussion on trust as it relates to the modern cybersecurity industry from the philosophical roots of the concept of trust to practical realities. We will relate from its base concepts through to modern implementations such as zero trust architecture and include aspects of insider risk and other challenges. Finally, we will discuss rules of engagement in community trust groups and trust as a tool for crisis operations.
Don Mallory 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, and the Latow Photographer's Guild at the Art Gallery of Burlington, where he taught traditional wet darkroom photography for 20 years.
We look forward to see you all there!
The TASK Steering Committee