Ahmed Afifi
Cybersecurity Director
Spark PS
Ahmed Afifi is a cybersecurity executive and vCISO with 14+ years of experience leading cyber resilience, GRC, and security transformation initiatives across banking, fintech, telecom, and other regulated sectors in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE. His work focuses on bridging governance, operational resilience, and human risk to deliver practical, business-aligned security outcomes. Ahmed has spoken at TEDx, PECB Insights Conference, and Black Hat MEA, sharing perspectives on cybersecurity strategy, resilience, and security culture in complex and highly regulated environments.
Speaker sessions
Briefings and Arsenals | Confirmed Speakers | No Session Assigned
Placeholder session for confirmed speakers without an assigned session, allowing them to be pushed to Swapcard and Visit.
- 07:30
- Tue
- 01 Dec
Stage:
Briefing Stage 2
Sessions Type:
Keynote
Breaking Remote Onboarding: Real Attack Paths Against eKYC, Liveness, OCR, and Fraud Controls
Remote onboarding has become a critical trust gateway for banks, Fintech, telecom providers, and regulated digital platforms. Yet many organizations still assume that combining OCR, liveness checks, selfie matching, document validation, and rule-based fraud controls is enough to stop abuse. In practice, attackers increasingly exploit weak orchestration between these controls rather than breaking a single control in isolation.This session examines how remote onboarding journeys can be attacked end to end, focusing on realistic abuse paths across identity proofing, document capture, liveness, device trust, workflow routing, and manual review stages. It will show how apparently compliant onboarding processes can still be vulnerable to synthetic identity abuse, deepfake-assisted impersonation, replay attempts, mule-account creation, and privilege gaps in exception handling. The session also highlights how fraud, cybersecurity, and product teams often assess different parts of the same workflow without modeling the full attack chain.Rather than presenting remote onboarding as a compliance problem, this talk reframes it as an attack-surface problem. Attendees will see how to map the onboarding journey as an adversarial kill chain, identify choke points where attackers pivot, and prioritize controls that reduce real exploitation risk. The session closes with a practical testing and defense model that security and fraud teams can use to evaluate remote onboarding resilience more realistically
- 14:00
- Tue
- 01 Dec
Stage:
Briefing Stage 2
Sessions Type:
Keynote