Adam Toscher
Adam Toscher is a New York–based security engineer and red team operator with 20+ years in offensive security, adversary simulation, and automation. A former IBM mainframe intern, he has held senior roles at Adobe, Optiv, Accenture, IBM X-Force, NYC Cyber Command, FDNY, and Cobalt Labs. His work focuses on realistic red-team operations, penetration testing, and practical security automation.
Session
Before the web. Before TCP/IP. Before “cloud.”
Some of the most powerful computers in the world were already online.
IBM mainframes didn’t grow up in the browser era. System/360 (1964), System/390 (introduced in 1990 and dominant throughout the 1990s), and today’s z/OS (released in 2000) were designed for batch jobs, green-screen terminals, and a world where the internet simply didn’t exist—yet these systems still quietly run banks, airlines, governments, and payment rails.
This talk is a guided tour of what happens when modern hackers bring cloud-era assumptions into a system that predates the web. We’ll break down how mainframes actually organize work (JES, JCL, RACF, CICS, PR/SM), why “root,” shells, and ports don’t mean what you think, and where attackers really interact with Big Iron today: transactions, protocols, management boundaries, and boring-looking misconfigurations that turn out to matter a lot.
No mainframe background required. No nostalgia cosplay needed. Just simple metaphors, diagrams, and stories from real red-team work—ending with a short checklist you can use the next time you find a system in scope that’s older than your favorite exploit class.