TrustNet team attends RSA Conference 2023 to stay ahead of cybersecurity, receive awards, and decipher Frisco’s charms
Every year since 1991, IT companies showcase their products and services at a venue where the world’s preeminent organizations and thought leaders in cybersecurity also explore emerging threats, trends, innovations, and opportunities.
This year, the much-awaited conference drew thousands of attendees and hundreds of companies to the Moscone Center, the largest convention and exhibition complex in San Francisco.
The event met our expectations. Team TrustNet attended the conference not only to discover fresh insights in security and compliance but also to receive two of the coveted Global InfoSec Awards.
We aimed to glimpse the future security landscape and duly re-orient our services roadmap to ensure customers’ sustained success. We were not disappointed. On the first day of the conference alone, several cybersecurity companies teamed up to form ETHOS (Emerging Threat Open Sharing). ETHOS is a platform designed to function as an alarm system for critical infrastructure, which has been increasingly targeted over the years by threat actors, including those sponsored by adversarial states.
(Note: TrustNet’s threat intelligence service is connected to a global community of 80,000 threat researchers and security professionals from 140 countries, currently cataloging around 19 million threat indicators.)
Throughout the event, there were many conversations surrounding Artificial Intelligence and its impact on society and our daily lives. We attended some discussions on what tomorrow’s AI would look like and how the present version of ChatGPT can already help people with their day-to-day tasks. However, some speakers raised concerns about the sensitivity of AI to complex verbal instructions, noting that some organizations hesitate to fully embrace AI because of “trust issues.”
While most attendees came from the different fields of information technology, quite a number were journalists, educators, marketers, policymakers, lawyers, and artists. One of the event’s highlights featured Grammy-award-winning musician Chris Stapleton. Stapleton raised the real possibility of widespread AI-enabled copyright infringements and AI’s eventual takeover of the creative arts. In Stapleton’s worst-case scenarios, Hollywood actors may not be needed anymore, while musicians might find themselves competing with fake AI versions of themselves.
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Our Favorite RSA 2023 Talks
Cyber Professionals Challenges and Insights. Let’s Talk.
Speakers:
Candy Alexander, CISO for ISSA
Jon Oltsik, Analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group
Summary:
This talk explores the pain points of IT security professionals as they navigate a rapidly changing field, and the most feasible solutions to those challenges.
What we’ve learned:
1. Cybersecurity professionals should educate themselves by keeping abreast of current trends, learning from the experience of peers, and applying real-world data to manage their careers.
2. The current skills shortage raises new challenges for organizations: dealing with AI models and ChatGPT, trusting AI to convey the truth, increased workload of current staff, and employee burnout. The talent gap is widest in the area of application security.
3. Improving a company’s cyber security program will entail additional training, including those for non-technical staff, strict adoption of best practices, and stress reduction.
Cybersecurity: Thinking to Reinvent Democracy
Speakers:
Bruce Schneier, Security Technologist, Researcher, and Lecturer at Harvard Kennedy School
Summary:
This talk pairs democracy and an IT system as an analogy to demonstrate how democracy can be “hacked” and “exploited” by malicious actors. One lingering dilemma is how to engineer democratic systems and institutions toward resilience against emerging technological threats such as AI and ubiquitous computing.
What we have learned:
1. Democracy is a sociotechnical system which can be easily hacked (i.e., there are loopholes and inconsistencies in the rules that govern society). The rich and powerful are hacking our systems.
2. Democracy and cybersecurity are not traveling at the same speed.
3. Misinformation disrupts democracy. The main problem is that misinformation is often incentivized.
4. Representation is currently failing in the US due to factors such as money in politics, gerrymandering, and the two-party system.
5. The current governance system leverages conflict to drive decision-making.
Face the Music: Cybersecurity and the music industry
Speakers:
Herb Stapleton, FBI Special Agent
Hany Farid, Professor at the University of California, Berkeley
Katherine Forrest, Partner at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP
Chris Stapleton, Singer, Songwriter, and Musician
Summary:
The music industry has been grappling with technological challenges, with the most pressing related to various risks artificial intelligence poses.
What we’ve learned:
1. The internet has drastically changed the music industry.
2. The younger crowd may take too much advantage of AI, which could affect their learning process.
3. Musician Chris Stapleton believes that AI has already corrupted many people, that Hollywood should take steps to prevent the system from eliminating the need for human actors, and that stronger copyright infringement laws need to be established.
Conclusion
Disruptive technologies have always spurred widespread economic and socio-cultural transformation. The recent improvements in AI capabilities present new opportunities and challenges for people, organizations, and governments as emerging risks match the intensity of potential rewards. Meanwhile, the talent gap in cybersecurity and the uptrend in cybercrime further complicate the threat landscape.
Events like the RSA Conference are perfect venues where these issues can be explored — and resolved — by domain experts and direct stakeholders who are equipped with the right data sets upon which to build the proper response. Fortunate to have taken part in the event, Team TrustNet took home a trove of fresh new insights that we can apply in many areas of our business, including product innovation and market strategy.
As another positive highlight, TrustNet’s affiliated brand — GhostWatch — has been awarded two coveted prizes during the conference: Next Gen Managed Compliance and Next Gen Managed Security Service Provider by Cyber Defense Magazine (CDM).
We’re staying true to CDM’s verdict. As the next-gen solutions provider, TrustNet and its brands continue our relentless campaign to innovate and future-proof our clients’ security and compliance posture.