SecretCon 2026

Death by Dashboards: Moving the Needle on What Actually Matters

Security teams love dashboards. Vulnerability scanners, compliance tools, and security platforms all promise a “single pane of glass” that shows everything happening across your environment. But when that pane of glass is filled with thousands of findings, how do you know what actually matters?
In Death by Dashboards: Moving the Needle on What Actually Matters, Tim Medin breaks down the reality many security teams face every day. Dashboards are packed with issues that look scary but often represent little real-world risk. Think endless TLS findings or compliance driven alerts that technically rank as critical but are nearly impossible to exploit.
Meanwhile, the problems that actually matter often get buried in the noise.
In this talk, Tim walks through how security teams can move past the overwhelming flood of vulnerability data and start focusing on what truly improves security. He’ll highlight the kinds of issues that rarely show up in standard dashboards but can have a much bigger impact on an organization’s risk.
If you’ve ever stared at a dashboard with thousands of findings and wondered where to even begin, this talk is for you.
Because security isn’t about having the cleanest dashboard. It’s about fixing the things that actually make your environment safer.

Researcher of dashboards

Tim is the founder and CEO of Red Siege Information Security. Tim spent more than a dozen years teaching thousands of students as Senior Instructor and course author of SEC560: Enterprise Penetration Testing at The SANS Institute. Through the course of his career, Tim has performed penetration tests on a wide range of organizations and technologies. Tim has gained information security experience in a variety of industries including previous positions in control systems, higher education, financial services, and manufacturing. Tim is an experienced international speaker, having presented to organizations around the world. Tim is the creator of the Kerberoasting, a widely utilized Red Team penetration test technique to extract kerberos tickets in order to offline attack the password of enterprise service accounts.