Last month, I attended my first security conference: RSAC 2026. The conference took place March 23-26 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, California.
I arrived in SF on Saturday, March 21st. After a 5-hour flight, I reviewed the conference agenda for key speakers and events. The week kicked off with a team dinner, where I got to meet the rest of the Cyber Defense Magazine team.
Day 1
RSAC began with a cappuccino from the CyBrew Cafe, where we were greeted by enthusiastic baristas representing Microsoft Security. Next, I visited the Cyber Startup Expo, where I spoke with many founders about their cybersecurity startups. Startup teams were finding innovative ways to incorporate AI agents into their platforms to help automate workflows and add additional layers of security.
In the afternoon, I spoke with Joshua Brown, the CISO of Spektrum Labs. When asked about what distinguishes his company from industry competitors, he stated that “Most, if not all, of the cyber tools are optimized for cyber operations, which really means they tell you what you need to do right now, what’s wrong right now, how to fix what’s wrong right now. But Spektrum Labs is the only company that is essentially a flight recorder for your cybersecurity resilience data. So we allow you to go back in time if you’ve had an incident or something like that, and you can see exactly what the state of posture of your tools was at that time.” This conversation gave me a deeper understanding of cyber resilience, which was a topic I briefly learned about in cybersecurity courses, but speaking to CISOs in-person about their work was a great learning experience.
Afterwards, I stopped by Tailscale’s peer-to-pour coffeehouse, featuring keychains and delicious pastries. One of my favorite parts about RSAC was the community events held in conjunction with conference sessions.
At 6pm, I headed down to the Early Stage Expo and immersed myself into a world of showcases and demos.
In the evening, I attended Sober in Cyber’s Rockin’ Mocktails event, where I met cybersecurity professionals and Women in Privacy and Security members.
Day 1 was a blast – onto Day 2!
Day 2
I started Tuesday morning by attending the Women in Cyber Executive Breakfast Panel. I listened to inspiring women speak about their leadership experiences in cybersecurity.
In honor of Women’s History Month, I interviewed Nur, the Co-Founder of ThreatMon End-to-End Intelligence. When asked about her experiences as a woman working in threat intelligence, she replied, “We challenge the system. We know that the number of women is much less in cybersecurity, but I think that in our sector (threat intelligence), women have a special power. And because of that, we think about everything, including the needs, the threat intelligence, and every possible challenge. A woman’s power has more importance in our sector. Her company is growing quickly, as she told me, “We are a new company. Founded in 2022, we grew fast in four years. We have more than 200 companies and a government agency in the United States.”
Later in the day, I attended two documentary screenings, where I learned about firewalls and the impact that women have on security. Both documentaries made me proud to be a woman studying cybersecurity!
After 20,000+ steps, Day 2 finished strong with great conversations and new perspectives.
Day 3
Day 3 started bright and early at 5 am. Arya, Angie, and I attended a 5K hosted by Tines at the Golden Gate Bridge, where we caught a beautiful sunrise.
Around noon, Arya and I interviewed Tim Freestone, Chief Strategy Officer of Kiteworks. We asked him about what makes his company stand out in regulatory compliance. “We’ve been around for 24 years. We kind of reinvented ourselves eight years ago. We’re really the only platform that moves data in and out of an organization and covers all of the channels. When you think about it, you’ve got email, file share, managed file transfer, you’ve got secure file transfer, you’ve got chat, you’ve got APIs. All these systems move data. We’re the only platform that covers all of those with a governance layer. We control who and now what can access and send data. From that standpoint, when we talk about the agent declared, we’ve been covering people accessing data, sharing data outside their organization, and now we just move that governance layer over to the agent world. So the same sort of identity management and policy engine that we have for people, now we just point at agents and we can provide the same level of governance and security to agents that we have been for people for 20 plus years.”
Arya and I also visited the booth of Illumio, one of our scholarship sponsors.
In the afternoon, I spoke to Anupam Upadhyaya, SVP Product Management of SASE and Network Security at Palo Alto Networks, about the company’s latest product launch. “The first thing we have done is we have a Prisma browser, which is for SaaS. We are now evolving it to allow the users to make the large language model of their choice, and they can now add their own of their choice and bring all the security that we have in the browser to those HTTPs as well. So what that really does from a user’s standpoint is, if a user is trying to put data that they should not be putting with the agent, you can stop that. Or let’s say that the agent is trying to take an action on your behalf, where you tell it to look at all these things with privileged information that we share, it can redact that information.”
Later that day, Arya and I boarded the Innovation Finalist Happy Hour Cruise hosted by Token Security, Geordie, Fig, and Zeropath. We sailed past Alcatraz Island and under the Golden Gate Bridge. The yacht also featured a live band and seafood hors d’oeuvres.
In the evening, I attended a Women in AI Night Market where I networked with women holding cyber leadership positions. Day 3 concluded with attendance at the Tunnel to Towers Fundraising Reception, which provides mortgage-free homes to veterans and first responders.
Day 4
My last day of RSAC started with a lavender latte from the CyBrew Cafe. As a current college student, I made sure to stop by RSAC’s College Day event, where I met fellow cybersecurity students and spoke with security engineers at McDonald’s and Walmart (my summer internship last year). Next, I attended my first lockpicking session hosted by a fellow attendee I had met the previous night at the Women in AI Night Market. I learned so many new tactics I had never known before.
Then, I checked out the expo one last time and said goodbye to the vendors.
Overall, RSAC was an awesome experience and I’m incredibly grateful to have attended this conference. I’m thankful for Cyber Defense Magazine for providing me with this wonderful opportunity, and investing in my future.
About the Author
Christie Peng is a 2026 scholarship recipient. She is an undergraduate at the Georgia Institute of Technology majoring in Computer Science, with concentrations in cybersecurity and media.
Over the past three years, Christie has gained hands-on experience across software engineering, data analytics, startups, and cybersecurity. As a two-time Home Depot intern, she partnered with stakeholders to build a quoting system projected to save $20M by optimizing carpet sales. She also interned with Walmart Global Tech in its Marketplace division, where she automated a global supply chain process. At an AI startup, she supported internal operations and product–market fit research. She is currently working as a co-op with Delta Air Lines in the Ground Support Equipment Safety division.
On campus, Christie has held multiple leadership roles, including Advisor and Head of External Communications for FreShGA (Freshman Student Government), Alumni Relations Director for her sorority, Kappa Alpha Theta, and committee chair for Georgia Tech’s Student Center Programs Council. She has organized events with significant budgets, such as The Final Stand and Midnight Breakfast, which had thousands of students in attendance. She also served as a Teaching Assistant for the Human Dimensions of Cybersecurity course, where she managed exams and hosted office hours for 113 students.
This scholarship will support her continued studies at Georgia Tech and empower her to pursue a career in cybersecurity. She looks forward to earning her first cybersecurity certification and attending conferences with the CDM.
