>> Narrator: Live from San Francisco it's theCUBE covering RSA Conference 2020 San Francisco brought to you by SiliconANGLE media. >> Welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We are at the RSA 2020, a really special segment. As you can tell it's really quiet here, it's not like normal CUBE action, we are here before the expo hall even opens on Thursday morning with a very special guest, we pulled them away from a crazy busy week if not more, it's Rohit Ghai the president of RSA, Rohit great to see you again. >> Always a pleasure, thanks Jeff. >> Absolutely, so I was really looking forward to this, I was really impressed by the opening keynotes, first it rolled out George Takei, that's a pretty bold move even more bold is to try to follow him up. >> Totally (laughing) >> So congratulations, and you know, that was pretty brave. >> I appreciate it, thank you. That was quite a, you know, quite a hurdle to got to follow George Takei. >> Right, and I just want to get kind of these other things that were kind of bubbling above the surface out of the way you know, a big piece of news, I think a week it came out before the show is that RSA was sold to Symphony I believe? >> Rohit: Symphony Technology Group. >> Right, so give us a little bit of the story there. >> Absolutely, so you know we entered into a definitive agreement, Symphony Technology Group acquiring RSA from Dell Technologies. What this does is this it basically clarifies the swim lanes for Dell Technologies to focus on intrinsic security and RSA can focus on managing digital and cyber risk, and you know, we are excited about the opportunity to become agile and independent and you know, kind of play in a smaller company setting to pursue our future, so we are super excited to be part of Symphony. >> Yeah, that's great, and the other thing that's kind of a pall, I mean just to put it out there is the corona virus thing. And you know, Mobile World Congress, a completely different show but a big show, probably the first big show of our industry this year was canceled. A hundred thousand plus people, so I just am just wondering if you can share kind of what were some of your thoughts and the team's thoughts 'cause we were all curious to see well how is this going to happen, there was a couple of drop outs but I think it's been a very good week. >> It has been a great week, you know what I'll say is it was a demonstration of resilience on part of the attendees, you know when we analyzed the situation what we noted was about 82 plus percent of our attendees are from the Americas right, so there was a core set of attendees that were perhaps not as impacted in terms of travel, et cetera, so we decided to move forward, we've been in close collaboration with the CDC and the mayor's office right here, Major London Breed's office right here is SF to make sure it's going to be a safe event for everyone and you know, the team put together a great kind of set of measures to make sure everyone has hand sanitizer. >> Great, great. >> And you know, we made sure we did what was needed to manage the risk and ensure resilience through this sort of you know very global risk that is playing out, so very proud of the team, and we garnered 40 thousand plus attendees despite you know, despite the coronavirus issue. >> You know, good job I am sure it was touch and go and a real sensitive situation and I can tell you a lot of other people and event organizers you know, were getting ready to head into a very busy event season, it's what we do and so, you know nice kind of lead indicator from you to execute with caution. >> I appreciate it, thank you. >> So let's jump into the fun stuff. So your key note was not really talking that much about bad guys and technology and this and that, you talked about story telling and you got very much into kind of the human element, which is the theme this year, but really the role of stories, the importance of stories, and most importantly for the security industry to take back their story and not let it get away from them. >> You summed it up really well Jeff, and you know what I said is hey if the theme of the conference is the human element, let's explore what intrinsically makes us human and the point, you know you've all know that it is stories that makes us human and I feel we've lost control of the narrative as an industry and as such we need to take that back and make sure we clarify the role of all the human characters in our story because until we do that, until we change our story we have no shot at changing our reality. >> Right, but you're kind of in a weird spot right, it's the classic spy dilemma. You can't necessarily tell people what you know because then they'll know that you know it and you might not be able to get more or better information down the road, so as you said in you keynote you don't necessarily have the ability to celebrate your wins, and a DDoS attack thwarted doesn't make the news. I keep thinking it's like ref in a game or like a offensive lineman in football you only hear about them on that one play when they get the holding call, not the 70 other plays were they did their job. >> Rohit: Totally, totally. >> So it's a unique challenge though >> It is, it is a challenge, it is not an easy problem and you know, there is a couple of recipes that I put out there for us to consider as an industry is you know, recipe one is we can celebrate our successes at a collective level right so, just like we put out breach reports, et cetera, in terms of what the statistics are, where the breaches are animating from we can talk about defensive strategies that are working at a collective level as an industry and share that sort of best practices recipes to win, that would be a fine start. I think another area, another point that I made was that we don't have to win for the hacker to lose. 71% of the breaches were motivated by financial gains, right, and as such if we, despite breaches, which is not a win for us, if we deny financial gain to the hackers we make them lose and they are subject to the same laws of economics, they have a profit and loss statement, they are spending resources for gain and when we deny them gain we make them lose, so those are a couple of ideas on how we can begin to change the narrative. >> Right. So the other piece of the human part is the rise of the bots, right, and the raise of AI and the rise of these increasingly smart and sophisticated machines. I think I saw one of those reports that we talk about on air was you know that people are an increasingly targeted group we hear it all the time, we hear about social engineering. As that gets more complicated, how does the role of people change? 'Cause clearly they can't monitor tens and tens and hundreds of thousands of concurrent attacks all the time. >> Absolutely, so you know the bad guys are using AI you know I cited the example of a deep fake audio clip that actually duped the CEO into initiating a wire transfer so they are using all these sophisticated attacks so to your point, we cannot rely on the end user to discern through these very sophisticates. It's unfair for us to think of them as the first line of defense, we have to on the IT side, we have to bring in technology, make the technology more usable, so you don't have to pay attention to this one millimeter by one millimeter lock at the corner of the browser to realize whether a web interaction is safe or not. We need to make more usable software, we need to do a better job of managing and reducing vulnerabilities to reduce the attack surface so IT has to step up in that regard, and then on the security teams I think they have to step up to use AI to detect bot initiated attacks so we are not leaning on the human to discern what is an anomalous interaction and what could be a phishing or a smishing attack, et cetera, you know we need to bring AI to fight the good fight on our behalf. >> Right. So the other kind of angle on that I thought was really interesting, Wendy's keynote, a couple of keynotes after yours from Cisco talked about, you know, a theme we see over and over in tech which is really kind of the democratization of security and get it out of just the hallowed halls of the super billion CSOCs and technologists that are just security and open it up to everybody so make them part of the solution and not those pesky people that keep clicking on links that they are not supposed to. >> Absolutely. She did a great job of kind of making that point and you know the way I think about it is again we need to move from a culture of elitism to a culture of inclusion. Until we really get the steaming going, not just within the security professionals which we are doing a better job of certainly in the industry, but we have to team with the user, the IT and the business teams in order to have a shot at tipping the balance in our favor. >> Yeah, it's really funny 'cause that kind of democratization theme is something that we see kind of across many levels of technology, whether it's in big data, can get away from the data scientists, in doing your own reports, in having access to your own marketing material and you know, so it's kind of funny that now we are just hearing it here I guess the last bastion of we're the smartest people in the room, no no, you need to use all the brain power. >> All the brain power. I use the phrase let's stop being STEM snobs and let's be more inclusive, and you know garner the entire spectrum of the diverse talent pool that we have available and you know making the point, perhaps a provocative point, that the cyber talent gap, a bit of it might be actually self-inflicted because we have been in this sort of elitism mindset. >> Right, and I think one of the themes that you talked about in you keynote was because of kind of the elite mindset we only want to focus on the elite challenges and in fact it's not the hardest challenges that are necessarily the most dangerous or the ones that are more frequently used, it doesn't have to be the craziest hardest way in. >> It absolutely does not. The point I made was preparing for the worse does not prepare you for the likely and the statistics are overwhelming. 60% of the breaches were on the back of six stolen credentials. That's a pretty table stakes basic issue that ought to be just taken off the table, and if we take care of the basics then we can focus our energy on the corner cases but let's first prepare for the likely before we get to the worst situations. >> Right. So Rohit I'm just curious to get your take as you have been here for the last couple of days, you know you did a whole lot of work getting into that keynote and getting this thing up and off the ground but you've had a couple of days to be here walked around, talked to a lot of customers and clients, partners, I wonder if there is anything that's kind of come up as a theme that you either didn't expect or kind of reinforced some of thoughts that you had coming into this week. >> Absolutely. I think if I would've net it out Jeff what I'm sensing is there is a whole movement to shift security left, which is this whole idea of IT stepping up as the first line of defense, reduce cyber exposure, take care of patching, multi-factor authentication, reduce the attack surface intrinsic security right so DevOps and SecDevOps take care of it right up front before the apps even get built right, then there is another movement to shift things right which is take care of the new aspects of the attack surface right, what the hacker always take advantage of are the areas where they sense we are unprepared and for a long time they've seen us being unprepared in terms of reducing the attack surface and then they go after the new aspects of the attack surface and what are those? IT, IoT, OT, data as an attack surface and the Edge right, so these are areas were there is a lot of activity, a lot of innovation, you know, on the floor here if you walk the corners shifting left shifting right as in all the new aspects of the attack surface. I am seeing a lot of conversations, a lot of innovation is that area. >> Yeah. Well, there's certainly no shortage of innovation in the companies here and in fact I think it's probably one of the biggest challenges that I think of from a virus perspective is to walk this floor and to figure it all out 'cause I don't know how many thousand of vendors there are but there's really big ones and there is lot's of little ones like you said tucked in the corner in kind of the cutting edge of the innovation. What advice do you give to people who is their first time coming to RSA? >> Yes, I think you know, it's a huge challenge for customers, there's 14 of every category. I think the customers what they have to see is they have to think about the recipe rather they have to focus not on the tool but the concept behind the tool, and think about the architecture right and they should seek out vendors that take this platform approach. It is, you know, the market hasn't consolidated that much where they can just go to a few vendors but when they build that architecture they should choose vendors that behave well as a puzzle piece in the jigsaw puzzle that our customers are having to assemble together right, that they are investing in the API integrations on the edges so they can slot in and be part of a broader solution. That's a key, key criteria that customers should utilize in their selection of the vendors. >> Yes, that's good. That's good advice, and they should be listening. So Rohit, thanks again for your time. Congratulations on a week and I hope you get that weekend of absolutely nothing coming up in just a couple of days that you talked about. >> I absolutely do. The joke I made was, you know, the only time I'm okay being labeled as useless is the weekend after RSA conference. So, I fully look forward to being useless over this weekend, it's been a great week and thank you again for having me. >> All right, two more days, 48 hours. All right, thanks again. He's Rohit, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE. We're at RSA 2020, the year we're going to know everything with the benefit of hindsight. We're not quite there yet but we're trying yo get a little closer. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)