From Vaccines to Nation-State Attacks: Takeaways from RSA 2022

Co-written with Joshua Swarz. 

More than 26,000 attendees, including 600+ speakers, 400+ exhibitors, and over 400 members of the media made their way to San Francisco’s Moscone Center and surrounding hotels for the first in-person RSA Conference in more than two years.

With friends, clients, and colleagues seeing each other for the first time in over 2 years, the energy at RSA was electric. The expo was the scene for interactive demos, customer meetings, and a general sense of trying to get back to normal. In fact, many attendees noticed a new array of exhibitors and other exhibitors with expanded booth sizes.

Big Valley had several clients within the cybersecurity space attending RSA this year, some had booths, others had suites at hotels and a few presented.

The usual grind continued over 4 days, and the conference featured some banner keynote speakers – from Jen Easterly, Director of CISA to Avril Haines, the Director of National Intelligence.

As we hustled from meeting to meeting, and session to session, themes emerged that were echoed throughout the show:

• Ransomware, Ransomware, Ransomware: The spotlight shined brightly on ransomware with experts from both the public and private sectors sounding the alarm on the rise of ransomware attacks – – many suggesting to not pay the attackers. Microsoft’s senior security strategist for critical institutions, Ethan Chumley said on a 2022 RSA panel that, “A risk that I am most fearful of is the growing trend of ransomware attacks.”
• Better Incident Reporting: There was a continued call for better incident reporting and sharing of information between the private and public sectors.
• What was Seemingly Old is New Again: While most in the cybersecurity industry have been pushing Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) for several years, the government launched a new campaign promoting its importance.
• The Rise of Supply Chain Attacks: The use of destructive malware and the continued rise of supply chain attacks are widely expected to get worse over the coming months.
• Nation States Are Not Letting Up: The presentations from CISA and NSA both focused heavily on the continued threat from nation state actors like Russia, China, Iran & North Korea.

Next year RSA will take place April 24-27. We are looking forward to seeing how the conference will grow and how RSA continues to bring the cyber world together.