Kristin Del Rosso

Honeypots and Hostile Takeovers: A Field Guide to Organizational Arbitrage

Not all compromises happen at the endpoint. While technical compromise is well understood, behavioral compromise enabled by social engineering, organizational dysfunction, and misaligned incentives remains a threat vector ripe for exploitation. This talk walks through a methodological means of recognizing patterns that lead to cultivated insider threats, where actors exploit gaps in organizational visibility, policy exceptions, or social dynamics to gain influence, access, or placement.

Through anonymized case studies involving honeypotted executives, attempted hostile internal takeovers, and corporate espionage efforts, this talk will dissect how subtle signals such as behavioral changes, relationship mapping, and broken enforcement norms can reveal growing security debt inside an organization. It will also show how technical instrumentation often misses this layer entirely unless designed with these dynamics in mind.

Attendees will leave with a practical framework for identifying organizational arbitrage, enforcing security culture, and separating malicious insiders from “move fast” employees, before a network compromise ever occurs.

Kristin Del Rosso is the co-founder and Managing Director of DEVSEC. With over a decade of experience in cybersecurity, intelligence, and investigative analysis, she focuses on applying technical expertise to complex cases across financial crime, cyber threats, white collar crime, and national security. With experience spanning hands-on technical research, product development, and broader intelligence analysis, she has worked with corporate, government, and law enforcement stakeholders to support high-stakes investigations. DevSec’s mission is to improve the tools and methods for tracking cyber adversaries and analyzing global fraud operations.

Beyond her investigative work, Kristin organizes multiple industry conferences focused on intelligence, security, and emerging threats.