Former CISA Director Jen Easterly Will Lead RSA Conference

Jen Easterly, a longtime public- and private-sector cybersecurity practitioner who led the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency for much than 3 years, has been appointed CEO of RSA Conference, known arsenic RSAC.

The enactment puts connected the salient yearly gathering of cybersecurity experts, vendors, and researchers that started successful 1991 arsenic a tiny cryptography lawsuit hosted by the firm information elephantine RSA. RSAC is present a abstracted institution with events and initiatives passim the year, but its league successful San Francisco is inactive its flagship offering with tens of thousands of attendees each spring.

“The league is the crown jewel, but present we are besides a year-round planetary rank entity for cyber professionals,” Easterly tells WIRED. “We are internationalizing much profoundly and I’m excited to grow the innovation sandbox, the aboriginal signifier expo and startup ecosystem, and that’s truly astir supporting the adjacent procreation of AI-driven cyber companies and unafraid by plan innovators to nutrient high-quality software. In galore ways we are surviving done an inflection point.”

Easterly’s assignment arsenic CEO surely comes astatine a infinitesimal of large modulation for the cybersecurity industry. AI tools are opening to heighten the capabilities of some attackers and defenders, and information experts person a important relation to play successful securing AI platforms themselves on with the infrastructure supporting the services. At the aforesaid time, the Trump administration’s stark alterations to US overseas and home argumentation look poised to change private-sector cybersecurity and public-private partnerships successful North America and astir the world.

Easterly emphasizes that she is simply a lifelong autarkic and that cybersecurity crosses each administrations and borders. She had aggregate deployments successful the US Army, worked for the National Security Agency, helped found US Cyber Command wrong the Department of Defense, and spent astir 5 years successful complaint of Morgan Stanley’s planetary cybersecurity, each earlier joining CISA successful 2021.

Trust gathering and collaboration person been immoderate of the astir important priorities of her career. But the Trump medication did not inquire her to enactment connected astatine CISA during the modulation astatine the extremity of 2024, and President Donald Trump has extensively criticized the predetermination integrity enactment CISA had been doing nether her enactment and that of her predecessor, Chris Krebs. Separately, successful July, the Army directed the Military Academy astatine West Point to rescind an employment connection it had made to Easterly to go the Robert F. McDermott Distinguished Chair of the academy’s Department of Social Sciences.

“I don’t attack this enactment accidental astatine RSAC done the lens of fearfulness and speculation, I attack it with the aforesaid relentless optimism and content successful the powerfulness of assemblage that’s been astatine the halfway of my service, nationalist and private,” Easterly says. “Cybersecurity is not a governmental endeavor, RSAC is surely not a governmental organization, and I americium not a governmental person. I americium a lifelong independent.”

Easterly says that RSA Conference volition proceed to invited insights and collaboration from officials of each governments arsenic portion of its efforts to facilitate assemblage gathering and collaboration successful cybersecurity. And she says that determination is “magic” that tin hap erstwhile the information assemblage has supportive forums to travel together.

“Security and resilience are issues that impact each country, each industry, each citizen,” she adds. “And RSAC’s spot is that it brings unneurotic operators and technologists and innovators and researchers and policymakers crossed administrations and crossed borders precisely due to the fact that it is grounded successful expertise and mission, not successful politics.”