Bangalore 2026 FIRST Technical Colloquium highlights resilience, AI, and community

By Logan Wilkins
Thursday, March 19th, 2026

The 2026 FIRST Technical Colloquium in Bangalore brought together a group of security professionals and students for two days of practical learning, technical discussion, and community building on Cisco's campus on February 10-11, 2026. The event created space for attendees to exchange ideas, share lessons learned, and strengthen connections across the incident response community.

The program reflected both the complexity of today's threat landscape and the community's continued focus on extending resilience. It opened with a keynote from Priya Madhavan of SSC NASSCOM on AI-resilient incident response and featured a second-day keynote from Ashutosh Bahuguna of CERT-In on the role of moving from security to resilience.

Across the two-day program, sessions included resilience in the AI software development lifecycle, enterprise security with eBPF, APT misattribution, defending private LLMs, managing high-profile CVEs, and much more. Together, these discussions showed how AI is shaping security from both sides: as a new source of risk and attack surface, and as an important part of how defenders improve visibility, resilience, and response. They also reflected the wider demands of modern incident response, where teams must balance emerging AI-driven risks with longstanding challenges like CVEs, supply chain threats, attribution, and enterprise defense.

As with any conference of this kind, the conversations between sessions were just as important as the formal presentations. The mix of seasoned professionals and students created a technically rich and highly collaborative environment, with informal exchanges sparking new ideas and partnerships.

Thank you to Cisco for hosting and sponsoring the event, and to the speakers, organizers, volunteers, and attendees who made the colloquium possible. Bangalore 2026 leaves behind not just a strong program, but a stronger community.