Hello from #RSA2016!

This week, a large fraction of the world’s top security professionals converge into the wonderful city of San Francisco for RSA Conference 2016.

Spread across several halls and buildings, the event has grown to be a kind of “meet anyone” type of conference/show, where you can’t walk for more than a 100 meters without running into a friend, colleague or customer. Perhaps it is no surprise that due to the popularity of the RSA Conference, many companies choose to announce new products or discoveries here.

I’m joined by some of my colleagues from GReAT: Kurt (@k_sec), Juan Andres (@juanandres_gs), Vicente (@trompi) and Brian (@Mao_Ware). The day began with Vicente’s presentation on the future of nation state-sponsored attacks. Looking at the evolution of these threats and actors over the past years from different angles, we can identify some patterns and evolutionary rules which can help predict what future attacks will look like. One of the most interesting points or predictions from Vicente’s presentation revolved around the idea that everyone knows how to do forensics on Microsoft Windows but very few can do it for network attached devices such as routers or smart power switches.

Vicente Diaz presents at RSA Conference 2016

This creates a blind spot that is undoubtedly being exploited by advanced threat actors to manage exfiltration of data from compromised networks and will become even more popular in the future.

The subject of targeted attacks is always on the agenda at RSA and Kaspersky Lab was also busy here with the announcement of a major expansion of its enterprise security portfolio. The new Kaspersky Anti Targeted Attack (KATA) platform was the main subject of a presentation from my colleague Juan Andres who was joined by Artem Serebrov.

Artem Serebrov and Juan Andres Guerrero-Saade introducing the KATA platform

The KATA platform is based on Kaspersky Lab’s expertise in the detection and analysis of some of the world’s most sophisticated cyber threats combined with several years of engineering and experience in developing security technologies.

You can find more details about KATA here: http://www.kaspersky.com/enterprise-security/anti-targeted-attacks

Moving from the realm of targeted attacks, my colleague Kurt presented on the evolution of the Internet of Threats (IoT) and automotive security. With things such as smart houses and why not, smart cities being a reality, security should play a major role as we take the first steps towards an interconnected world.

Kurt Baumgartner discussing threats against IoT and transportation systems

If you happen to be at #RSA2016 don’t forget to stop by our booth and have a chat!

Signing off from RSA,

@craiu