Global Security Mag: Can you introduce yourself and tell us how your professional background led you to your current role?
Laurent Tombois: I hold the position of Country Manager France & North Africa at Bitdefender, where I lead the strategic and commercial development across these markets, supporting organizations in strengthening their cybersecurity posture.
My career has been built around technology and cybersecurity, with a strong focus on digital transformation and risk management challenges. I have evolved in various environments, which has enabled me to develop a comprehensive view of the challenges companies face today.
At Bitdefender, we place particular emphasis on innovative approaches around prevention and attack surface reduction, in order to help organizations anticipate increasingly sophisticated and often invisible threats.
Global Security Mag: What will be your focus at the InCyber Forum 2026?
Laurent Tombois: at the InCyber Forum 2026, we focus on three main areas: digital sovereignty, risk prevention, and the role of artificial intelligence in cybersecurity. We aim in particular to shed light on how organizations can regain control over their digital environments, beyond infrastructure considerations alone, by mastering their technological dependencies and their exposure to risk.
We also observe that many recent attacks exploit legitimate tools and overly broad user access, which are often difficult to detect. To address these market challenges, we are launching Bitdefender Attack Surface Assessment, a tool designed to help organizations regain control of their internal attack surface. The objective is to provide a clear view of the attack surface by highlighting unnecessary access, risky usage, and phenomena such as shadow IT.
This approach is part of our PHASR (Proactive Hardening and Attack Surface Reduction) strategy, which aims to reduce the attack surface upfront by limiting opportunities for exploitation. The tool leverages AI-based analysis capabilities to prioritize actions and automate certain remediation processes.
The tool is based on data from real-world incidents to help prioritize remediation actions and progressively reduce the attack surface.
Global Security Mag: What are the strengths of the solutions you will present on this occasion?
Laurent Tombois: Bitdefender’s solutions are based on a strongly prevention-oriented approach and attack surface reduction. This logic is at the core of our PHASR strategy, which aims to limit opportunities for exploitation by acting upstream. We use artificial intelligence to continuously strengthen the security of environments, taking into account user behaviors and usage patterns, in order to identify and block threats even before execution.
A key point today concerns so-called “fileless” or Living-Off-the-Land attacks, which exploit legitimate system tools. Our solutions also enable the identification of excessive access, shadow IT, and unmanaged usage, in order to reduce blind spots and strengthen control over environments.
Finally, we provide a high level of transparency and control, which is essential to address digital sovereignty challenges.
Global Security Mag: This year, the InCyber Forum will focus on “Mastering our digital dependencies.” What is your analysis of this topic?
Laurent Tombois: the notion of digital dependency is now central, but it is often misunderstood. It is not limited to data location or technology choices, but concerns the ability to understand and manage the entirety of one’s exposure.
Organizations operate in increasingly complex environments, with technological, software, and human dependencies that can become points of fragility, particularly when certain accesses or usages are not properly controlled.
In this context, digital sovereignty primarily relies on the ability to reduce these dependencies, strengthen system resilience, and maintain control over security operations, especially in the face of threats that increasingly exploit legitimate usage.
Global Security Mag: How do your solutions address this issue?
Laurent Tombois: our solutions enable organizations to regain control over their attack surface by adopting a proactive and evolving approach.
Concretely, we help identify areas of exposure, including often invisible internal risks related to user access or the tools being used, and then reduce these risks upstream before they can be exploited. This approach is aligned with our PHASR strategy, with a logic of progressive and measurable reduction of the attack surface, supported by AI-based analysis capabilities.
Thanks to concrete recommendations and progressive remediation capabilities, organizations can significantly reduce their attack surface and limit their exposure to modern attack techniques. This combination of visibility, prevention, and action helps strengthen resilience and reduce operational dependencies.
Global Security Mag: How should technologies (AI / Quantum, etc.) evolve to help master digital dependencies?
Laurent Tombois: Artificial intelligence plays a central role in the evolution of cybersecurity. It enables attackers to industrialize their methods, but also allows defenders to improve their detection and response capabilities. We are seeing that attacks are increasingly embedded in business usage, leveraging credible scenarios such as invoices, contracts, or professional communications, making them harder to detect.
To master digital dependencies, these technologies must evolve toward greater transparency, control, and integration within existing environments. It is also essential to secure AI systems themselves, as they are becoming critical assets.
Global Security Mag: What message would you like to convey to CISOs, DPOs, CIOs, and cybersecurity leaders?
Laurent Tombois:
The main message is to place prevention back at the core of cybersecurity strategies. In the face of a constantly expanding attack surface, it is no longer sufficient to detect and react: it is necessary to reduce opportunities for exploitation upstream, particularly by controlling access and usage.
It is also essential to gain visibility into one’s environments and to better understand digital dependencies in order to strengthen resilience.
Finally, in a context marked by the rise of AI and the rapid evolution of threats, organizations must both leverage these technologies for defense and ensure that they do not themselves become new vectors of risk.
