RSAC 2025: Trust, Friends, And The Best In Cybersecurity

RSAC last week in San Francisco was a community gathering of the best in cybersecurity leaders, innovative startups, investors, and strategic partners. This is a community where trust and friendships mean everything. As many say, cybersecurity is a team sport with the difficult mission of protecting everything we hold dear, including our countries, institutions, and the people we love. This was my 10th year attending RSAC. I have never seen more people so happy to see, hug, and collaborate to take on our generation’s most critical cyber threats and risks when change, risks, and threats are accelerating exponentially. 

LEARN: What Is Narrative Intelligence?

At every RSAC session, conversation at the Four Seasons or St Regis bar, in meeting spaces in hotels surrounding Moscone, in hotel elevators or lobbies, day and evening events and dinners, or walking the city streets as you saw people you knew walking to and from the show, the conversations centered around current events going on in the world, the sophistication and substantial funding of our adversaries (cybercriminals and nation-states), targeted attacks on our infrastructure, companies, and executives to create chaos and to seek financial gain, the concerns around AI being used for harm including narrative attacks created by misinformation, disinformation and deepfakes and the risks associated with securing our identities where anyone can look and act like someone they are not to do harm digital and even physical harm.

It’s a complex set of topics to deal with on a 24/7 basis, yet this community attending RSAC and the teams they represent back home are made up of the best security leaders. These innovative startups bring new technologies to protect against these threats; the partners that enable them and the powerful investors that support them are all up to the task. To fight the good fight. To reduce risks and threats where possible, and when possible, take threat actors out. This community knows we can win when we collaborate and constantly innovate. That is why events like RSAC worldwide are essential and why the cybersecurity community needs to unite. That’s why we need to build on trust and friendships and hug it out as we are better for it. Here are some of the people who I trust, call my friends, and am happy to hug who I saw at this year’s RSAC. Thank you for the great work you do! 

Mark Weatherford, Ed Amoroso, Megan Dubofsky, Hattie Egan-Young, Dave Palmer, Mark Hatfield, Sarah Kuranda, Barbara Massa, Amy De Salvatore, Katherine Hennessey, Hannah Huffman, Dave DeWalt, Robert Rodriguez, Lauren Rodriguez, Gianna Whitver, Maria Velasquez, Katie Lanza, Samantha Signh Andersson, Danielle Ostrovsky, Tim Eades, Katherine Kuehn, Diana Nicholas, Julia Pardee, Michael McKenna, Rick Friedel, Laurie Mushinsky, Jon Oltsik, Frank Walsh, Cindy Zhou, Greg Fitzgerald, Jen Perisho, Kat Young, Gavin Reid, Laurie Donato, Lamont Orange, Sandra Carielli, Kati Buchheit, Joe DePalma, Brian Tillman, Chris Pierson, Alastair Paterson, Michael Marriott, Emily Kolilias, Jeff True, Duncan Hanson, Bryan Woolgar-O’Neil, Dov Yoran, Elad Yoran, Ann Johnson, Felix Knoll, Jonathan Dambrot, George Georgopoulos, Anna (Jensen) Tutt, Ana Corio, Dustin Smith, Gene Fay, Keith Stewart, Nick Infusino, Wasim Khaled, Radhika Shah-Meade, Kandace Miller, John Wissinger, Mark Oney, Greg Young.

• To receive a complimentary copy of The Forrester External Threat Intelligence Landscape 2025 Report, visit here.
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