Moscone Center bulged with over 42,000 attendees as another exciting RSA conference wrapped up last week in San Francisco. There was more than enough key takeaways from this security conference — we will only cover a few sessions that sparked our interest.
This year’s conference included 17 keynote presentations and more than 700 speakers (across 550+ sessions) with over 600 exhibitors.
Interesting topics and tracks ranged from Analytics, Intelligence & Response, Cryptography, Hackers & Threats to Machine Learning, Security Mashups, and Mobile & IoT Security.
Standout Sessions & Key Takeaways
The opening keynote “Cybersecurity Silver Linings” with Rohit Ghai, President of RSA Security stated “there is a fine line between tech love and tech trust, as we’ve seen recently. It takes a long time to build trust but a second to lose it. He further elaborated “cybersecurity is about doing what’s right and protecting people in an ever more complex world.”
Key Takeaways
- The industry should focus on marginal gains in security not the future of threats—we should talk more about our advantages — focus on what’s working and do it faster, not on the fear of failure.
- Organizations need to think about the psychology of defense, not just the technology.
Another interesting keynote “Our Biggest Bet Yet” with Marc van Zadelhoff, IBM Security General Manager believes man and machine are coming together to do great things and we could be one start-up away from solving cybersecurity.
Zadelhoff said there is plenty of progress in the air—CIO’s are better prepared and no longer ask basic questions — they ask much more technical questions and want detailed answers.
Key Takeaways
- As an industry we must be better at open collaboration — currently, IBM has given access to services to develop over 50 apps on IBM systems with 100,000 downloads.
- All for the better good of security, so optimism is in the air.
Alan Paller, Research Director and Founder of SANS Institute moderated “The Five Most Dangerous New Attack Techniques, and What’s Coming Next” keynote session with SANS panelists Ed Skoudis (Top Hacker Exploits Expert & Instructor), Johannes Ullrich (Dean of Research) and James Lyne (Head of R&D, SANS Institute).
The top five threats include:
- Repositories and Cloud Storage Data Leakage
- Big Data Analytics, De-Anonymization, and Correlation
- ICS/SCADA Exploitability: More Malware Disruption Attack
- Monetization of Compromised Systems Using Cryptominers
- Hardware Flaws
Our CTO, Dr. Giovanni Vigna & Vasilios Mavroudis, University College London Session — The Good, the Bad and the Ugly of the Ultrasonic Communications Ecosystem
From its inception, the ultrasonic communications ecosystem has faced myriad security challenges. Both Vigna and Mavroudis effectively demonstrated ultrasonic communication shortcomings and delivered thought-provoking proposed mitigations.
Key Takeaways
- An air gap (A.K.A. – air wall or air gapping) is a network security measure employed on one or more computers to ensure that a secure computer network is physically isolated from unsecured networks, such as the public Internet or an unsecured local area network.
- Ultrasound cross-device tracking deployments can be abused to perform stealthy deanonymization attacks (e.g., to unmask users who browse the Internet through anonymity networks such as Tor), to inject fake or spoofed audio beacons, and to leak a user’s private information.
In Conclusion
It is security conferences like RSA where each one of us can contribute, listen, learn, glean and share valuable insights in order to strengthen and support the global cybersecurity backbone — hopefully, to secure all our cyber futures, as well as the future of our successors.
On another note — we were excited to introduce the Lastline Behavioral Intelligence
Program—a behavior-based approach to threat intelligence that improves security effectiveness, speed to remediation, and completeness of remediation.
The Lastline Behavioral Intelligence Program is built on core strengths of Lastline — our understanding of malicious behaviors and our ability to connect them to intrusions and breaches . . . with this program, we’re overcoming serious shortcomings in existing threat intelligence systems that deliver one-time IoCs that are essentially useless for blocking future attacks, resulting in broken incident response processes and ineffective intrusion defenses. — CEO and co-founder, Chris Kruegel
We also featured Lastline’s Breach Defender Spring Release via a number of demos at our booth.
Overall, this year’s RSA conference featured a broad range of perspectives, enveloping strong echoes of optimism about the future of cybersecurity.
The post RSAC 2018 — Key Takeaways — Echoes of Optimism appeared first on Lastline.
Article Link: Threat Intelligence Archives - Network and Security Virtualization - VMware