Hi, I'm Melinda Marks, Senior Analyst for
Enterprise Strategy Group. And I'm here with Jon
Oltsik, distinguished analyst and ESG fellow. We
went to Black Hat, along with our colleague, John
Grady, and wanted to share some key takeaways.
John, what did you think of the show?
Melinda, maybe it's because RSA is earlier in the
year and black hat's later in the year, but RSA
seemed to be a review of the industry to me. And
black hat was more of a future of the industry,
but not just the industry, it was a very scary
look at the threats and threat actors. And then a
lot of okay, well, what can we do better to
address those threats to minimize those threats
and to mitigate risk? So I don't know that that
was kind of my summary. What did you think?
Although I hear about the show being more
corporate, and some people compare it to RSA,
because of all the vendor participation, I think
it's really important to realize that this show
hosts a lot of hands-on training and skills
activities. And a lot of these sessions, like you
said, they are futuristic, and they really reveal
these emerging types of attacks, and how to defeat
them. So Jon, for those who couldn't attend, what
can you share for highlights?
Well, generative AI came up quite a bit. And
interesting, I think the industry is way ahead. So
the supply side is way ahead of the demand side.
And I'm a little concerned about balkanization
there. So lots of different generative AI engines
really servicing the same problem. You know,
platformization was big. In your domain, we heard
a lot of platformization of cloud security tools,
getting closer to developer. So there was a lot of
review of things that we've seen in the past. But
I think between platformizaton, scale, AI,
automation... Again, I think we're pointing to
this future platform that that's that's much, much
more comprehensive, and perhaps more intelligent.
What did you see?
Yeah, so I'm still catching up on a lot of the
videos, thank goodness, they recorded a lot of the
sessions because I had so many meetings, but they
were fun sessions on things like hot wiring a
Tesla, jailbreaking your electronic vehicle
sessions on vulnerabilities using rootkits for
attacks, some sessions around software supply
chain vulnerabilities and approaches such as NPM,
and six store. So I'm really excited about these
vendors who are taking those research topics. And
reflecting that with the offerings that they have
seeing companies that are focused on API security,
software, supply chain security cloud platforms,
like Jon mentioned, who are helping manage risk,
it's also really nice to have the conversations on
the show floor with the companies who are having
real conversations with developers and helping
security help developers with rapid pace of
development today with a move to the cloud. So
when security teams can work more closely with
developers for goal alignment, and developers want
to know that these tools are helpful for them.
It's better for security to be seen as enablers
instead of blockers to digital transformation and
advancing the tools that they're using.
That's what I saw too, more focused on the
business, more focused on developers, good synergy
between business and security people. But the
challenge is huge. The challenge, because the
threat landscape is changing so quickly, and the
scale of the problem is growing. So I'm encouraged
but you know, you have to be cautiously optimistic
in security. And it really does set up the second
half of the year. So Melinda, I attended a CIO
dinner on Monday night, which was probably the
highlight for me at BlackHat. And CISOs are
getting the funding even in this economy. Because
the board, the executives realize all of the
initiatives that they put on the table, our
technology initiatives, and they're seeing the
threats. And so this was I talked to people in the
medical industry, they were talking about
telehealth and wearables. I talked to
manufacturing organizations, I talked to tech
organizations. So they get it. But it makes it
more complex for security. What did you see?
Yeah, I agree. And I think people are recognizing
there's there was a culture of move fast and break
things. And now the organizations are really
realizing security is so so important. The more
you advanced, the more you adopt these newer
technologies you need to invest in in security and
that's why these types of conferences where you're
getting that cutting edge research of what's
ahead, what the hackers might be doing, helps give
you that advice. Sariel let's make sure we can
stay ahead of this because that's the key to our
business remaining competitive and getting hitting
our goals hitting our revenue goals, if secure if
there's a security problem that throws everything
off.
Yeah, we're not shifting left. We're shifting WAY
left, now. So all the way to the business people
considering the threat landscape, and that's good
thing.
Yes, absolutely. So Jon, thanks so much for
joining me and joining us today to talk about our
what we saw at BlackHat. And for those watching,
be sure to follow us for more let us know what you
thought of the show.