The inaugural Billington Critical Infrastructure CyberSecurity Summit will take place November 17–18, 2026, at the Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center in San Antonio, Texas, with nearly 30 speakers confirmed in the organizer’s October announcement and more than 80 expected by November. The gathering brings together government officials, infrastructure operators, security practitioners and industry leaders to examine how cyber threats to energy, communications, transportation and water can spread across the essential services Americans depend on every day. Billington is positioning the summit as the first national event to unite all four lifeline sectors in a single forum, reflecting a problem that conventional sector-by-sector security discussions can struggle to address: the systems are connected, even when their defenders work separately.
The announced lineup includes Nick Andersen, Acting Director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency; Brett Leatherman, Assistant Director of the FBI’s Cyber Division; Tony Sauerhoff, Executive Director of the Texas Department of Information Resources and the state’s chief information officer; and retired Vice Admiral TJ White, Chief of Texas Cyber Command. Together, they bring federal infrastructure protection, cyber investigations, state technology leadership and operational defense into the same conversation. The broader speaker community includes representatives from the U.S. Department of the Air Force, state governments, utilities, Idaho National Laboratory and the information sharing and analysis center community.
Other confirmed speakers include Mike George, Assistant Chief of Homeland Security Operations in the Texas Department of Public Safety’s Homeland Security Division; John Godfrey, Chief Information Security Officer for the Kansas Information Security Office; and Erin McGinnis, Kansas’s Director of Statewide Cyber Collaboration and Preparedness. David Ketchen, Assistant General Manager of Littleton Electric Light and Water Departments, adds a utility operator’s perspective, while Zach Tudor, Associate Laboratory Director for National and Homeland Security at Idaho National Laboratory, brings expertise from the Department of Energy’s laboratory network. Chris Wolski, founder of Applied Security Convergence, is also among the announced participants. That mix matters because infrastructure security decisions have to work in operating environments where service continuity, physical safety and limited resources shape what can actually be implemented.
The central issue is the potential for disruption to cascade across sectors. Water treatment and distribution require dependable electricity; energy operations rely on communications; transportation networks move fuel, equipment and replacement parts. An organization can therefore face an operational emergency even when the initial intrusion occurred somewhere else. Billington CyberSecurity President Troy Schneider has framed the summit around these wider consequences and the need for collaboration between sectors that underpin defense, public health, safety and economic activity. For attendees, the useful question is how that collaboration translates into earlier warnings, clearer responsibilities and recovery plans that account for dependencies outside their own networks.
The threat discussion will encompass state-linked activity targeting U.S. infrastructure, including the risks posed by Chinese, Russian and Iranian actors. The practical concern extends beyond stolen information to the availability and integrity of systems that control essential services. Defending those environments requires coordination between enterprise security teams and the engineers responsible for operational technology, with decisions grounded in how facilities actually run. It is a demanding balance, frankly: an urgent security change still has to be safe for the equipment and processes it touches.
The National Council of ISACs is the summit’s official Community ISAC partner and is working with Billington on audience engagement and cross-sector collaboration. Its involvement gives the event a connection to the communities that share threat information across industries, helping bring the conversation closer to the needs of infrastructure owners and operators. Public-private cooperation is particularly important in a field where much of the infrastructure is outside direct government control, while the consequences of an outage quickly become a public concern.
The San Antonio gathering will also connect with GovRAMP’s third annual Cyber Summit, scheduled for November 15–17 at the same convention center. The Billington Critical Infrastructure CyberSecurity Summit opens at 1 p.m. on November 17, placing the two events back-to-back and giving state, local, tribal and territorial government security leaders an opportunity to continue discussions with infrastructure operators and federal partners. The arrangement links government technology assurance with the broader challenge of keeping essential services operating through a cyber incident.
Billington brings an established federal and state cybersecurity event network to this new summit. Its flagship federal gathering has run since 2010, and the organizer reports that nearly 200 sponsors, community partners and participating government agencies supported its 17th annual summit in 2026. Its state and local summit attracted registrants from 42 states this year. The inaugural infrastructure event extends that network into a focused discussion of shared operational risk, where the value of cooperation will ultimately be measured by how well organizations can anticipate disruption, maintain essential functions and restore service together.