RSA Conference sessions

One of the sessions from the RSA Conference I would recommend watching is “The Five Most Dangerous New Attack Techniques and How to Counter Them”. The format was a discussion with panelists from the SANS Institute.

There is a video of the session on the conference page, and you can probably follow along while you’re multitasking on other things. Many of the security practices they talk about should already be familiar to people working in the industry, but there are some creative opinions and tips the panelists give out.

Another good session was from Splunk and was called “Effectiveness vs. Efficiency: 10 Capabilities of the Modern SOC”.

One of the key things I learned from this talk was that beyond the changing threat landscape in the industry, there is a major shortage of people to work on security. The presenter mentioned there would be 3.5 million unfilled security jobs by 2021. Added to that, he talked about the fact that AI is still in the very early stages within the security field, and that there are no major products currently that are really using AI.

The presenter also talked about the OODA loop (cycle of observe–orient–decide–act, from military combat), and how within security, the person executing that loop faster can win. Another good analogy was that comparing SOC automation capabilities to that of the automation level for self driving cars (0 is no automation, 1 is driver assistance, through level 5 with complete automation).