I don’t know where you are, but the data analysis of the RSA Conference by the prestigious Cyentia Institute is amazing. They wrote algorithms to tell us what the “most important” talks are each year from 25 years of security conference data, and illustrate our industry’s trend over time. Who can forget “A top 10 topic in 2009 was PDAs”?

This is the slide that made everyone laugh, of course:

Trends going up? GDPR, Ransomware, Financial Gain and Extortion. Big Data exploded up and then trends down over the last five years.

Trends going down? BYOD, SOX, GRC, Hacktivism, Targeted Attack, Endpoint, Mobile Device, Audit, PCI-DSS, APT, Spam…

Endpoint going down is fascinating, given how a current ex-McAfee Marketing Executive war is going full-bore. RSAC 2018 Expo Protip: people working inside Crowdstrike and Cylance are hinting on the show floor how unhappy they are with noise made about a high-bar of attribution to threat actors given their actual product low-bar performance and value.

That’s just a pro doing qualitative sampling, though. Who knows how reliable sources are, so consider as well the implication of qualitative analysis.

Some cyber companies talk threat actor in the way that Lockheed-martin talks when they want to sell you their latest bomb technology. Is that bomb effective? Depends how and what we measure. Ask me about 1968 OP IGLOO WHITE spending $1B/year on technology based on threat actor discussions almost exactly like those we see in the ex-McAfee Marketing Executive company booths…