Top 6 Trends from RSA Conference 2024 — ExtraHop

What you'll learn

• RSA Conference 2024 drew a record 2,700 speaking session submissions from 130 countries, and the topics chosen revealed an industry under significant institutional and personal strain.
• The SEC's four-day cyber incident reporting rule, issued in December 2023, generated more anxiety than almost any other regulatory development, driving a surge of sessions on materiality and disclosure obligations.
• Criminal indictment risk has made Directors and Officers insurance a priority conversation among security leaders, many of whom say their compensation no longer reflects the personal liability they are expected to absorb.
• That imbalance is accelerating attrition, with longer-tenured CISOs opting for early retirement rather than accepting liability exposure that other comparably compensated executives do not face.
• Burnout compounded those pressures, with security professionals caught between the need for rapid incident response and the simultaneous need to document every decision for potential legal scrutiny.
• AI dominated both the Innovation Sandbox and the speaking program, with startups and practitioners focused on model integrity, LLM-powered SOC operations, and the emerging risks of AI-generated threats.
• Supply chain security completed the picture, with the XZ Utils backdoor discovery arriving as a timely reminder that proactive risk management remains aspirational for much of the industry.

Topics covered