Day Three At RSAC 2024: Insights From IBM Security, OpenText Cybersecurity, And Aembit

It’s Day Three at this year’s RSA Conference in San Fransisco—one of the biggest events in the cybersecurity calendar. With the conference in full swing, we’re hearing about new product launches and innovations, with a lot of focus on securing the use of generative AI, enabling security teams to do more with less, improving the cybersecurity talent gap, and nation states’ roles in developing cybersecurity policy.

Expert Insights are at the show to learn from some of world’s top cybersecurity experts. Today, we spoke with leaders from IBM Security, OpenText Cybersecurity, and Innovation Sandbox runner-up Aembit to find out the biggest challenges they’re trying to solve, and get their top tips for IT professionals trying to secure their businesses. Here’s what we learned.

IBM Security

IBM Security is a provider of intelligent cybersecurity solutions and services that enable enterprises to align, manage, and modernize their cybersecurity.

The challenge they’re here to discuss:

“Time is a non-renewable; I can’t get it back,” says Jenifer Kady, Vice President of Security Sales at IBM Security. “So, the quicker that I can get something to market, the better off I am in terms of not just productivity, but also revenue and, ultimately, my brand in and of itself. GenAI levels so many different playing fields; it allows a number of different types of developers to have access to controls that they might not have had in the past. It also gives ubiquitousness to what I might be able to do as a company in terms of projecting a new application, how I want to go to market, or what I want to be doing in terms of new studies or research that I’m performing. It levels the playing field, it gives more people more access, and it gives a heck of a lot better return on investment when it comes to time.

“But there are a lot of safeguards that need to be put into control there too, because, more often than not, you’re talking about open-source development and crowd sourcing that’s potentially taking place as far as models being created. So, while there’s an excellent flow when it comes to leveraging and using GenAI, there are also some controls and there’s some newness to it. And security isn’t always at the forefront when teams are developing a new application. Because of that speed to market, security’s not always the priority.”

IBM Security’s solution:

IBM Security’s risk-based approach to GenAI security has three prongs, says Kady. “You identify your data, first and foremost, and you know what you need in terms of making those decisions on what is being put into that model.

“The next step is protecting the model in and of itself. So, continuously scanning and ensuring that [you know] how and what people have access to in terms of data, but then also the guardrail of that particular model in and of itself. The scanning on a regular basis will help you in terms of knowing how it’s being used, what’s being used, and then whether you need to do some sort of recalibration of the model.

“And then finally, it gets into the usage. The users should be able to trust the model that’s coming in and understand why they’re using it and what it’s all about.”

OpenText Cybersecurity

OpenText Cybersecurity provides a broad portfolio of threat detection, response, triage, and remediation solution to help organizations defend themselves against today’s most prevalent cyberthreats—powered by intelligence from their internal team of Cyber Threat Hunters.

Paul Reid, Global Head of Threat Intelligence for Team Helios

The challenge they’re here to discuss:

As Global Head of Threat Intelligence for Team Helio at OpenText Cybersecurity, Paul Reid says that it’s absolutely critical for cybersecurity providers to share their research and intelligence with the rest of the industry.

“Cybersecurity is really a trust relationship, right? We build trust with our customers, we build trust with our partners, we build trust in the community. It’s in building that trust that allows us to share that information. The bad guys share all the time. So, we need to be sharing as well.”

OpenText Cybersecurity’s solution:

Another important benefit of gathering and sharing threat intelligence is enabling organizations to have greater visibility of threats across their entire ecosystem, and breaking down siloes between disparate tools, Reid says.

“We need to have commonality across our security tooling. We need to be able to share information better across different software, and that’s something that OpenText Cybersecurity is doing a really great job at. We’ve brought numerous products together, including BrightCloud, Webroot, ZIX, ArcSight, ArcSight Intelligence, CyDNA, Fortify—there’s such a suite of them. We’re working to share that information at process so that if one product learns about a threat, we all learn about that threat. And we’re really pushing hard on that because that information sharing is so critically important.

“We also belong to a lot of open-source communities; we support Mist, which is a great way to share threat intelligence; we publish our MISP as well and share that; and ArcSight is also part of VirusTotal now. So, when someone submits something to VirusTotal we’ll check it as well. And I believe BrightCloud does that as well. So, we are part of the community; we want to be sharing. We also announced a partnership with JCDC [the Joint Cyber Defense Collaborative] here in the U.S., to be part of their critical infrastructure sharing opportunities. We get access to information that other people may not get access to, but we can also provide information in a very confidential way that other members of JCDC can take advantage of as well.”

A word of advice for CISOs at RSAC:

“My message to any CISO starting out is get your fundamentals right,” says Reid. “Get a good strong foundation. If you have that, that’s half the battle right there. Then of course good threat intelligence, good products, good interoperability, staying up to date on the latest things—all those types of things will make you better and more cyber secure, but for me, it’s critical to do your fundamentals first.”

Aembit

Runner-up of the 2024 RSAC Innovation Sandbox contest, Aembit is a workload identity and access management platform designed to help organizations manage and secure machine-to-machine access. Described by co-founders as “Okta but for workloads”, the platform aims to eliminate secrets in the same way that cloud identity providers are eliminating passwords.

The challenge they’re here to discuss:

“Systems can talk to each other across a network, but you really don’t have any security layer there,” says Kevin Sapp, Co-Founder at Aembit. “There’s nothing like the processes that we have for people where, for example, Kevin can log into Salesforce because somebody said so, and we have all these controls that mean he has to prove who he is before he can log into Salesforce. People were saying to us, ‘I have all these apps and applications that are talking to each other, but I have no control over any of that.’”

Aembit’s solution:

“What people really want to do is connect one app to another app or a service,” says Sapp. “That’s how apps are built.

“So, what we basically concluded is that this is really an access management problem. You really want someone to specify software A should be able to talk to service B and be done with it.”

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