2026-10-29 –, Workshop Room
It's 02:47 in the morning when the call comes in. Some systems aren't responding. Customer data may have been stolen. Your phone won't stop ringing and your colleague asks you with a shiver in his voice: "What do we do now?"
Having watched dozens of leadership teams walk into that exact moment here’s what stands out: Most of them have crisis plans. Most of them have done a tabletop. Almost none of them stay calm the way they thought they would.
This talk is about what happens when the playbook breaks. Not the plan written down, but the reflex underneath it. In gamified fully-immersive simulations we put teams in a room with a live SIEM, a hacker on the chat, social media on fire, a regulator on hold and a ransom on the table. No pause. The clock runs. The information keeps changing.
What we see in that room is not what people tell themselves they would do. What I'll show you today is what really decides how a team gets through it: The patterns we watch for during a simulation, scored in the moment so we can come back three months later and see who got sharper.
And you won't be sitting still for all of it either. Somewhere in this hour you'll be asked to make a decision you can't unmake. No saws. No lost legs. Just the clock, what you don't know yet, and no one but you to make that call. The same call those teams faced.
I won't tell you what they decided.
You'll have to come see for yourself…
Next to her fulltime job at the government, Kaja is the founder of CyberMaster, a fully-immersive cybercrisis simulation that puts teams under the kind of pressure no slide deck can.
The foundation for CyberMaster was laid in her background in criminology, law and technology and cybercrime, cybersecurity and riskmanagement, which is where she learned that cyber problems are rarely just technical: they're about people.
As a proper nerd, she loves to discuss these topics endlessly which is why she is a guest lecturer at the University of Twente and TU Darmstädt, where she does her best to make privacy law sound... less.... like... privacy law and to introduce to technical students that there is also another side of cybersecurity.
Therefore, her work sits at the intersection of privacy, cybersecurity and the human factor and after guiding enough crisis teams. She is convinced people are our strongest link in cybersecurity, NOT the weakest!