Rohit Ghai, RSA | RSAC USA 2020
Channel: SiliconANGLE theCUBE
Date: 28/02/2020

Rohit Ghai, President, RSA, sits down with Jeff Frick at RSAC USA 2020 in San Francisco, CA.

#RSAC #RSA #theCUBE @SiliconANGLE theCUBE @RSA Conference

https://siliconangle.com/2020/03/02/as-rsa-opens-a-new-chapter-rohit-ghai-sees-securitys-strength-in-the-human-element-rsac-guestoftheweek/

As RSA opens a new chapter, Rohit Ghai sees security’s strength in the human element

VIDEO EXCLUSIVE BY MARK ALBERTSON

When it chose “Human Element” as the central theme of its annual U.S. conference, RSA Security LLC must have gazed deep into a crystal ball and foreseen the near-term future.

RSA’s annual U.S. conference, held last week in San Francisco, opened with the deadly coronavirus spreading rapidly and affecting thousands of people around the globe. It was also mere days after the company’s employees learned that RSA had been sold by Dell Technologies Inc. to the private equity firm Symphony Technology Group for over $2 billion.

In a world of machine-driven intelligence and “viruses” that infect networks instead of people, February’s headlines were an important reminder that humans still control the narrative.

“It is stories that make us human,” said Rohit Ghai (pictured), president of RSA. “I feel that we have lost control of the narrative as an industry, and we need to take that back and make sure we clarify the role of all the human characters in our story. Until we change the narrative, we have no shot at changing reality.”

Ghai spoke with Jeff Frick, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the RSA Conference in San Francisco. They discussed the recent sale of RSA, celebrating success and denying financial gain for attackers, increasingly sophisticated hacking tools, a need for diversity and the latest threats confronting the cybersecurity community.

This week, theCUBE features Rohit Ghai as its Guest of the Week.

Agile and independent
RSA was founded in the late 1970s when three MIT students — Ronald Rivest, Adi Shamir and Leonard Adleman — developed a data encryption formula using a combination of public and private keys. Although the company is best known for its SecurID authentication tokens, it also provides solutions for governance, incident event management, threat detection, and compliance.

Dell gained control of RSA in 2016 when it purchased EMC Corp. There had been rising speculation that RSA would be sold, as Dell’s VMware Inc. steadily grew its own security division, as exemplified by the acquisition of Carbon Black Inc. for $2.1 billion last year.

“It clarified the swim lanes for Dell Technologies to focus on intrinsic security and RSA can focus on managing digital and cyber risk,” Ghai said. “We’re excited about the opportunity to become agile and independent and play in a smaller company setting to pursue our future.”

Celebrating success
Ghai’s recipe for changing the security narrative is part celebration of the industry’s successes and part denial of financial gain for threat actors. Defeating a denial-of-service attack or successfully defending against daily threats at an almost unimaginable scale qualify as victories in a perilous digital world.

One executive with FortiGuard Labs disclosed during the RSA conference that his firm monitored 10 million attacks per minute or over 100 billion events every day.

“We can celebrate our successes at a collective level,” Ghai said. “Just like we put out breach reports in terms of what the statistics are and where they’re emanating from, we can talk about defensive strategies that are working at a collective level as an industry and share best practices, recipes to win.”

The financial side may prove to be a bit more challenging. Estimates are that ransomware attacks alone cost government agencies and businesses over $7.5 billion in 2019. At one RSA conference presentation last week, a security researcher from Trend Micro Inc. said that subscription tools for launching denial of service attacks were available on the Dark Web for as low as $40 per month.

“We don’t have to win for the hacker to lose,” Ghai said. “Seventy-one percent of breaches are motivated by financial gain. If we deny financial gain to the hackers, we make them lose.”

Countering deep fakes and fostering inclusion
In his keynote presentation last week, Ghai described how the chief executive of one company had been tricked into wiring $243,000 to a hacker’s fraudulent account by a “deep fake” audio recording of another executive’s voice.

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Here’s the complete video interview, part of of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the RSA Conference: