RSAC 2025: What We Expect at the Largest Cybersecurity Conference of the Year

Now in its 34th year, the RSAC Conference originated with RSA Cybersecurity. In 2022, RSA the conference separated amicably from RSA the company. New this year, the group behind the conference has evolved into the RSA Community, with memberships and year-round activities. By any name, it’s the biggest cybersecurity conference around. Last year’s event drew over 41,000 attendees, 650 speakers, 600 exhibitors, and 400 members of the media, according to RSAC. PCMag will attend this year’s event the week of April 28, reporting back to you with our takes on the most interesting events of the conference.

Artificial Intelligence: Can’t Live With It, Can’t Uninvent It

The conference is abuzz with sessions involving AI. Can we safely hand off important tasks to agentic AI apps that act without direct human supervision? How do we manage and authenticate non-human identities such as AI bots, apps, and IoT devices?

A keynote by cybersecurity expert Bruce Schneier will address two facets of making AI trustworthy. First, we need policy guardrails to ensure that AI responses are accurate and appropriate. Second, we need to protect it against external attacks that could cause it to jump those guardrails or compromise its responses.

Generative AI systems rely on masses of input data to provide useful responses. We’ve seen in past RSAC presentations that specific peculiar prompts can trigger responses that break an AI’s internal rules. In addition, tweaking input data for the large language model (LLM) that powers such an AI can throw a monkey wrench into its responses. We’ll attend an offsite demonstration of LLM poisoning—skewing LLM results using poisoned inputs.

Using an AI chatbot like ChatGPT gives the impression that you’re interacting with a living, thinking entity. Young people, in particular, believe AI is conscious already, or will be soon. Security influencer Ira Winkler aims to shoot down that myth in a session titled, “AI Is Just Math: Get Over It!” But will the myth stay busted?

How Can Seniors Stay Safe Online?

Our older population didn’t grow up with everything online, but they can’t avoid the modern online world. From making medical appointments to viewing videos of grandchildren, everything is online, including fraudsters and scammers. Coming from a TV news and investigative journalism background, Kerry Tomlinson has been focusing on protecting vulnerable seniors from online attacks and teaching them strategies for managing their own protection. She’ll present her findings in an RSAC conference session.

Beef Up Your Scam Prevention Efforts

Seniors aren’t the only ones who need to be wary of scammers. Anyone, even cybersecurity experts, can be a scam artist’s next target. At the RSAC Conference, attendees will learn how to better protect themselves and their communities from scammers with help from Ayelet Biger-Levin, the CEO of RangersAI, a company that sells scam-prevention tools. Biger-Levin will explain why scammers are so good at their jobs and how to use data-hunting strategies to spot online scams effectively.

The New World Wide Web Is All About Your Privacy

We call Vint Cerf the father of the internet, but Sir Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web that makes that global network accessible. Not one to rest on his laurels, Berners-Lee now promotes an evolution of the web called Solid, which strongly focuses on keeping individuals in control of their personal information. Working with security luminary Bruce Schneier and other top minds, his new venture, Inrupt, promotes the global evolution of the web to truly become “a medium for the secure, decentralized exchange of public and private data.” To learn more about this campaign, we’ll sit for a one-on-one with Schneier during the conference.

You Can’t Keep Cybersecurity in a Box

The RSAC Conference takes place throughout the many massive buildings of San Francisco’s George R. Moscone Convention Center, true. But even when no conference is going on, The City is home to dozens of prominent cybersecurity companies, including Cloudflare, Cisco, Check Point, and OPSWAT. We’ve been invited for a site visit to OPSWAT’s critical infrastructure protection (CIP) Lab in SF’s Potrero Hill neighborhood.

DARPA’s AI Cyber Challenge Experience

Whatever your attitude toward government agencies in general, you can’t deny that DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency)  has significantly contributed to your high-tech life. Just for starters, its earlier incarnation as ARPANET laid the groundwork for what we now call the internet. Among its vast number of research projects, DARPA is running AIxCC—the Artificial Intelligence Cyber Challenge. This two-year campaign will finish at the DEF CON conference right after Black Hat this summer. To bring this somewhat arcane competition down to earth, DARPA created an AIxCC Experience as part of the RSAC Conference. We’ll participate in a special press walkthrough of the experience.

About Neil J. Rubenking

Lead Analyst for Security

When the IBM PC was new, I served as the president of the San Francisco PC User Group for three years. That’s how I met PCMag’s editorial team, who brought me on board in 1986. In the years since that fateful meeting, I’ve become PCMag’s expert on security, privacy, and identity protection, putting antivirus tools, security suites, and all kinds of security software through their paces.

Before my current security gig, I supplied PCMag readers with tips and solutions on using popular applications, operating systems, and programming languages in my “User to User” and “Ask Neil” columns, which began in 1990 and ran for almost 20 years. Along the way I wrote more than 40 utility articles, as well as Delphi Programming for Dummies and six other books covering DOS, Windows, and programming. I also reviewed thousands of products of all kinds, ranging from early Sierra Online adventure games to AOL’s precursor Q-Link.

In the early 2000s I turned my focus to security and the growing antivirus industry. After years working with antivirus, I’m known throughout the security industry as an expert on evaluating antivirus tools. I serve as an advisory board member for the Anti-Malware Testing Standards Organization (AMTSO), an international nonprofit group dedicated to coordinating and improving testing of anti-malware solutions.

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About Kim Key

Senior Security Analyst

I review privacy tools like hardware security keys, password managers, private messaging apps and ad-blocking software. I also report on online scams and offer advice to families and individuals about staying safe on the internet. Before joining PCMag, I wrote about tech and video games for CNN, Fanbyte, Mashable, The New York Times, and TechRadar. I also worked at CNN International, where I did field producing and reporting on sports that are popular with worldwide audiences.

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