Community Engagement Meeting – November 2026

Join us in the virtual realm via Teams for OxCyber’s monthly meetup, where expertise, innovation, and collaboration converge in the heart of Oxfordshire & the Thames Valley.

Event title: Cost as an Attack Surface: Can You Stop a Denial-of-Wallet Attack?

Presented by Marco Zaccaria Di Fraia, PhD (Founder, Prismatic Labs)

Unlike traditional DDoS attacks that rely on overwhelming request volume, a Denial-of-Wallet (DoW) attack targets the economics of an AI system. By understanding downstream agentic pipelines, an attacker can turn a single cheap prompt into a disproportionately expensive chain of inference, tool calls, and retrieval.

The result? System costs surge undetected by conventional volume monitoring until protective budget caps or automated kill switches kick in, forcing a service outage or causing uncapped financial damage.

In this interactive session, we will break down how attackers weaponise a system’s own economic safeguards and how to build defences against runtime inference waste.

What we’ll cover:

• Volume vs. Leverage: How modern AI architectures allow low-volume traffic to trigger long, expensive chains of agentic work.

• The Stealth Threat: Why traditional network monitoring fails when request volume stays flat while token consumption and compute costs skyrocket.

• Live Attack Demonstration: We will attack a controlled AI endpoint together, track metric divergence in real time, and analyse the signals needed to intercept runaway computation.

About the Speaker:

Marco Zaccaria Di Fraia, PhD, is an engineer, researcher, and founder working across AI, space systems, and sustainability. He is the founder of Prismatic Labs, creators of Vetch, an open-source runtime designed to detect and stop runaway agents, bloated context, and inference waste in production AI systems.

Save the Date: Tuesday, 17th November 2026

Time: 9:15 – 10:25 am (networking until 10:40 am)

Where: Online via Teams

Register here: https://events.teams.microsoft.com/event/65fa41b8-6da3-4593-92cb-059f10e2ed2d@158e39a1-001c-44f0-90d6-35872708c845

Don’t miss out on this cyber-revolution! Secure your spot, mark your calendar, and let’s dive deep into the realm of cybersecurity together.

The future is digital, and OxCyber is leading the way!

We look forward to having you attend the event!