Dailydave mailing list archives

Re: I watch the 2016 RSAC Keynotes so you don't have to


From: Andreas Lindh <andreas () haxx ml>
Date: Thu, 17 Mar 2016 09:06:00 +0100

Dave,

Thank you for this post. I am a big fan of Snarky Dave (not so fond of
Team America Dave, but you probably knew that already) and this is SD++.

One thing that strikes me is that I get the feeling they are mostly just
going through the motions, some of them doesn't even seem that
enthusiastic about their own topics. Not that I'm surprised, most of the
content is basically rehashing what others, less high up in the food
chain, has been saying for years, but with the useful parts removed.

I know that there is good content being presented at RSAC too, but those
sessions are never made available anywhere (at least not for free). To
me, that says something about how disconnected RSAC is from the people
in the trenches, doing the actual work. Not that surprising really, in
the eternal words of Against Me: "There was purpose to be served, there
were fortunes to be earned".

AL

On 2016-03-16 22:05, dave aitel wrote:
http://www.rsaconference.com/videos?tags=Keynote

I like to watch all the keynotes after RSA and see what kinds of
themes there are. Partially because keynotes are 100K at RSAC and that
means that probably someone put time and effort into making them worth
listening to? They are like the SuperBowl ads of our field. Also
sometimes our friends are on stage, which is exciting.

Most years, there are one or two that are hilariously bad. Also,
because it is a prestigious thing to do, you often have speakers who
are executives at big security companies, but who are not necessarily
polished pro-level public speakers. What we're looking for in these
talks is Vision, with a capital V.

In 2016, as usual, most of every keynote fell into the category of
"wishful thinking". Every big company wants the industry to give them
all of the threat data, and then let them do the "innovation" on the
analysis side.

That's never going to happen! But yet you hear it again and again,
year after year. Cisco
<http://www.rsaconference.com/videos/ascending-the-path-to-better-security>and
HP and RSA and Intel
<http://www.rsaconference.com/videos/louder-than-words> and everyone
else say this year "What if everyone just used our platform for your
point products?" which sounds great but the only real way people have
been able to make themselves a platform for point products is to do
M&A. Collectively all the big companies have realized that the
management costs of all their products are prohibitive for every
customer, and no customer is going to buy just one product stack.

HP did have some interesting hidden announcements about how they can
find DNS beacons going outbound out of all of their huge data set.
They said they find 50 new ones a day. I don't think they've tested
against INNUENDO <http://immunityinc.com/products/innuendo/> yet
though. Everyone SAYS they are doing lots of great analysis, but how
do you know you are detecting APT unless you can test against APT?

It is also amazing to see DIRNSA declare privacy of our citizens part
of the essential equation
<http://www.rsaconference.com/videos/remarks-by-admiral-michael-s-rogers>.
He also stuck to the government talking point about how industry is
amazing and can find a magical compromise. And of course, he, along
with everyone else, has caught on to the idea that data theft can
quickly turn into data manipulation.

It's also interesting to hear the president of RSA talk about how
badly the Government messed up with Wassenaar, and to hear that nobody
who helped write the VMWare talk bothered to tell the CEO of VMWare
that Wireshark is free software.

To be fair, VMWare won "Worst of Show" this year
<http://www.rsaconference.com/videos/not-lost-in-translation-building-an-architecture-to-reshape-cybersecurity>.
They demoed some moderately interesting capabilities (software defined
networking as part of your VMWare stack!) but everything about the
talk was grating and terrible or an obvious half-truth. The CEO of
VMWare has no idea that Wireshark is free software, and neither did
anyone who helped write their talk. They paid one hundred thousand
dollars to demonstrate on stage in front of three thousand customers
how much vision they are lacking...and it is showing in their
corporate performance as the get eaten alive by the rest of the
virtualization market.
 
Also, we have to stop bringing kids on stage to talk about how the
"Youth are our future". It's so boring. 

-dave

Previous years:
https://lists.immunityinc.com/pipermail/dailydave/2014-April/000661.html
https://lists.immunityinc.com/pipermail/dailydave/2014-April/000642.html


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