Cognitive Warfare and the Future of Security Awareness
GhostEye founder and CEO Mohammad Eshan presented at CognectCon in Tampa on February 4, 2026. His session explored cognitive warfare and what it means for the future of security awareness.
Trust relationships as an attack surface
In his post-conference reflection, Eshan drew a connection between mapping technical trust relationships and mapping relationships between people. His red-team experience using BloodHound to understand Active Directory attack paths provided the starting point.
He described how synthetic identities can exploit communication patterns and connections to find a route to a target’s trust. The focus was on relationships: who a person knows, who they respond to, and how an attacker might use that familiarity.
That perspective connects to GhostEye’s work testing realistic social engineering and understanding what happens after a person engages with an attack.
