Ask five people in trucking where their most significant risk lives and you’ll get five answers. The truck. The freight. The people. All of them are right. This is the reason the 2026 National Motor Freight Traffic Association, Inc.® (NMFTA)® Cybersecurity Conference agenda contains the lineup that it does. Two days, three parallel threads, September 29 to October 1 at the Marriott Long Beach Downtown, California. The conference will open with a keynote from Vishal Amin of the Spades Institute, followed by the annual “State of NMFTA” session and a State of the Industry panel discussion with CISOs from some of the leading fleets in the industry.
The Truck
This year, NMFTA will be introducing a split track that contains both general audience sessions and highly technical content on day two. Ben Gardiner will present his research into an EC80 security update, a recent feature at both Black Hat and DEF CON. In this session, Ben will lay out a specific finding in detail. However, it points to something structural in onboard communications, and the broader ecosystem around onboard electronics in the modern Class 8 vehicle. Sean Herron, CISO at Samsara, comes at the telematics hardware from the attacker’s point of view, mapping the telematics attack surface and what offensive testing turns up before a bad actor can. Bosch’s Ivan Granero tackles the analyst’s version of the problem. How do you investigate across vehicle data, telematics, and IT logs when none of them speak the same protocol? Gardiner and Anne Zachos of NMFTA will put TCAT, NMFTA’s forthcoming Trucking Cybersecurity Assessment Tool, directly in attendees’ hands for a 90-minute training block.
The Freight
Cargo theft has quietly become a cybersecurity problem, and the agenda will dedicate several sessions to addressing this issue. Ole Villadsen of Proofpoint traces the chain from a phishing email to a redirected trailer, remote-management tooling and all. A panel of experts from across the industry will discuss the issue from multiple vantage points in “Securing the Load,” and an invitation-only fraud prevention roundtable gives practitioners somewhere to talk candidly.
The Person
On the human side of security, there will be discussions ranging from making the business case for cybersecurity training and investment by Melanie Padron of IT ArchiTeks in “Proof to Profit.” James McQuiggan of Apparent Security opens the social engineering conversation with what synthetic voice and video are already doing to broker and carrier verification workflows, and a follow-on panel keeps the thread going, bringing in experts from across the industry to discuss both the attacker’s view and best practices for defense against social engineering. Threat intelligence experts Alexandra Moore and Tina Ellis addresses the gap many security teams feel acutely with Jordan Strawn of Werner Enterprises: Separating actionable threat intelligence from the daily noise.
In addition to Ahmed Shah of Malleum reconstructing a ransomware incident from patient zero to recovery, NMFTA and Antisyphon training will conduct a live, hands-on incident response tabletop allowing attendees to put theory into practice as they construct incident response plans and test them against various attack scenarios.
The conference will close with a Call for Collaboration that gives the industry a voice in the research and development that NMFTA will engage in over the coming year.
This is a one-of-a-kind event focused on cybersecurity in the trucking industry, a topic that has never been more important across all of the sectors of critical infrastructure. If you pick one conference to attend this fall, make it this one.
Learn more and register now at nmftacyber.com.
