AI agents may battle AI attackers, but at RSAC 2025, it’s still about improving security workflow

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May 5, 2025

SiliconANGLE article by Jason English

At first glance, as you wander onto this expansive Moscone Center expo floor, witness some of the near-million-dollar booths, you might wonder if the only kind of budget consideration on the chief information security officer’s mind is something related to responding to new artificial intelligence threats with AI agents — or perhaps worrying about monster trucks or goats crushing or eating a user’s mobile phone.

But beyond the glitz, AI agents can barely scratch the surface on the shortage of skilled cybersecurity talent available to address the exploits our software faces today. In this regard, newer AI-based security tools are really just the next incremental boost in automation toward protecting an exponentially expanding attack surface exacerbated by AI.

Attending the 34th annual RSAC 2025 in San Francisco with 44,000 others, I really started to understand why the organizers would pick a theme like “Many Voices. One Community.” It will take people from different walks of life, many of whom did not envision themselves as cybersecurity professionals, working together, to get us out of this AI cybersecurity mess we’ve created.

Here’s a rundown of some themes expressed at the conference and a sampling of interesting information resources and vendors I talked to that are addressing modern challenges with unique approaches and products:

Improving awareness across the hybrid cloud stack

Fundamentally, most security solutions (SIEM, SOAR, UEBA, XDR and the like) are data management solutions — as all threats and vulnerabilities can only be perceived through data movement and activity within volumes and networks, which emit telemetry signals such as logs and traces.

OpenText was one of the major brands there with a broad cybersecurity portfolio that blends both enterprise and consumer threat awareness data behind the scenes. Through machine learning, its new OpenText Core TDR platform can detect difficult-to-spot unique insider threats from privileged users, whether or not they are using AI tools.

Checkmarx announced an early access program for its agentic AI-powered control plane for application security posture management or ASPM), which declaratively scans all packages in the repository, to show developers prioritized vulnerabilities and unknown code references directly within the developer’s IDE.

Bot security management vendor Netacea recently donated its BLADE open-source framework, which is now accepted by the OWASP community, allowing experts to recognize business logic attack definitions for errant automation and AI agent behaviors beyond the currently known CVEs