With over 40,000 official attendees, and another estimated 40,000 people coming into San Francisco around RSAC but not attending the event, RSAC has attracted a large and inquisitive crowd. AI remains the hot topic of conversation. Most vendors have their own take on it and how it applies to their solution stack, while CISO’s and practitioners are coming to a better understanding of how they can use AI to accomplish their objectives.
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From a security perspective, some of the common trends around AI are either in its use to help organizations analyze their data to identify trends, create linkages in threat data and reduce the amount of time spent with manual analysis by a SOC team, and identify threats earlier in the kill chain. Additionally many vendors now see AI as a way to help organizations create or automate the creation of better tooling, reporting, and workflows to help them get ahead of the curve.
Either way, most attendees are not looking at AI as the solution to everything, but rather an additional tool that’s part of a vendor's solution stack that lets organizations maximize the value of their investments.
CISOs have been particularly concerned about the use of AI to create new and novel malware to bypass existing security stacks and tooling. It’s something that we see every day, with attackers leveraging AI tools to create new pieces of zero-day malware, or phishing attacks. This has caused security leaders to take a step back to understand how their security vendors can approach this challenge as early in the kill chain as possible, with the ideal being detecting it at the point and time of attack, and where the attack actually takes place.
From an endpoint perceptive, the ability to detect threats on-device, without requiring teams to send data for analysis, and having true zero-day detections has become an important aspect of an organization's security strategy, especially on mobile devices.
Mobile devices and mobile apps are also gaining much more attention and awareness. Many security vendors are now including mobile as part of their talk track, and attendees are asking how they can protect their devices from common attacks like phishing or third-party app risks. Additionally, they are also looking at their application security stack, and realizing their mobile app security has become a major hole in their strategy, and are looking to address it as part of their larger security strategy.
Other important trends coming from RSAC 2024: a great awareness of threat telemetry and analysis of that threat telemetry. It’s not just for an organization's specific data, but many organizations are looking to vendors to offer a global perspective and a comparison of how they are doing versus the rest of the world. Much of this has been driven by boards asking for more input from CISOs on how the organization is doing, and what they need to invest in.
This year’s RSAC has been a lively show, with a range of conversations focused on AI, mobile, and threat telemetry. Many vendors have unique and exciting offerings, but it’s apparent that there’s no single product that solves everything. Any of these products displayed on the show floor must fit into a larger corporate security strategy.
Kern Smith, Vice President Americas, Zimperium
