The Help Desk: High-Value Target Under Siege

Wednesday, October 29, 2025 | 10:45AM–11:30AM CT | Meeting Room 207 CD, Level 2
Session Type: Breakout Session
Delivery Format: Industry Insights
For higher education, it’s essential to recognize that the battle to protect enterprise resources has shifted, and why focusing on human behavior has become critical to cybersecurity operations. Technical defenses like firewalls, continuous monitoring and remediation, and AI-assisted analytics remain essential tools in that battle. However, malicious actors have found a way around those defenses, using deception and impersonation to prey upon unwitting individuals within organizations and tricking them into sharing their credentials. What’s changing is the growing assault on help desks. Threat actors recognize that service desk agents, tasked with assisting employees and managing access, hold the keys to the kingdom. A service desk agent can change a password, reset credentials, manage multifactor authentication (MFA) devices and troubleshoot access issues. A successful impersonation doesn’t just compromise one user; it provides the attacker with the legitimate tools to escalate privileges, move laterally, access sensitive data like payroll accounts, or deploy ransomware, which makes the service desk a very valuable target for threat actors. 

Presenters

  • José Dominguez

    Chief Information Security Officer (CISO), University of Oregon

  • Bill Hunkapiller

    Chief Information Security Officer & Chief Privacy Officer, Florida State University

  • Molly McLain Sterling

    Sr. Director of Global Cybersecurity Strategy, Proofpoint, Inc.

  • Adam Mikeal

    Chief Information Security Officer, Texas A&M University