Luminaries Discuss Hot Security Trends, From Clouds to Hacks, at RSA

by Sean Michael Kerner

Once again, the RSA Conference was held at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, and filled the North, South and West buildings.

During the opening keynote of the 2015 RSA Conference, Amit Yoran, president of RSA Security, said that much of existing security is broken and change is needed.

Scott Charney, corporate vice president, Trustworthy Computing, at Microsoft, explained that cloud users want transparency and control, which he said is something that Microsoft is committed to delivering.

Art Gilliland, HP senior vice president of enterprise security, detailed in his keynote how security continues to be an evolutionary process. As an example, he used the game “Halo,” which added many new features over the years, though the basic gameplay has remained the same.

Bruce Schneier’s session covered the effects of the massive Sony hack. Schneier, CTO of incident response management vendor Co3 Systems, said the key for organizations is to be as resilient as possible to be able to withstand cyber-attacks.

Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson took to the keynote stage at the RSA Conference to explain what the U.S. government is doing in cyber-security, including a new DHS office in Silicon Valley, and why encryption isn’t always a good thing.

One of the biggest deals announced at RSA was the $1.9 billion Raytheon acquisition of Websense, whose security expertise will augment Raytheon’s Cyber Product division.

The U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) was an exhibitor and provided attendees with information about security and job opportunities.

The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation also had a booth, with the centerpiece being a Tommy gun.

Security professionals often consider dealing with hackers to be a game of “Whac-a-Mole.” Security vendor BeyondTrust brought a game machine it called “Whac-a-Hack” onto the RSA show floor to reinforce that idea.