2026-10-30 –, Main Hall
During a major cyber incident, who actually controls the story? Increasingly, it's not the victim. Threat actors have figured out that narrative damage, like reputational collapse or a stock price in freefall, can hurt worse than the breach itself and it can be built in parallel to the attack. By the time legal has cleared a statement, the attacker may have already spread a confident, detailed account of catastrophic impact, and the media has run with it.
This talk looks at case studies like the 2014 Ukraine elections and the 2023 MGM Resorts breach to discuss how cyber operations and narrative attacks can get synchronized on purpose, asking who in your crisis structure is actually responsible for closing that gap.
Ieva grew up in Lithuania, where the line between an attack and narrative manipulation was the backdrop of daily life. That early exposure became an academic focus (a master's in International Security at Sciences Po Paris, with Ukraine as her case study) and, later, a profession.
She has worked on OT Security and operational resilience projects in Switzerland and is now at Accenture Netherlands, helping clients improve their capabilities in cyber recovery, Major Incident Management, and DORA. Much of that work involves rebuilding crisis management structures to survive contact with a real incident. She studies how attackers pair technical and narrative attacks, arguing most crisis plans still aren't prepared for it.