10 Cybersecurity Companies Making Moves At RSAC 2024

Alongside a number of major product launches, vendors have announced funding and acquisitions — and signed a new CISA-backed security pledge — during the massive security conference in San Francisco this week.

In and around the RSA Conference in San Francisco this week, the majority of the biggest names in the cybersecurity industry have had a major presence. A few have had major news, too.

Numerous cybersecurity CEOs have taken the stage at RSAC 2024 to tout their latest offerings and initiatives, while security giant Palo Alto Networks took the opportunity to hold a major AI product announcement event of its own Tuesday.

A notable startup acquisition and a massive funding round have also been among the big moves announced in connection with RSAC 2024.

[Related: 20 Coolest Cybersecurity Products At RSAC 2024]

Meanwhile, dozens of companies signed the new “Secure by Design Pledge” announced by the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).

CRN has been on hand speaking with top executives at many of the RSAC news makers this week.

What follows are the key details on 10 cybersecurity companies making moves at RSAC 2024.

Palo Alto Networks’ Big AI Launch

Palo Alto Networks unveiled its new Precision AI capabilities across its product portfolio Tuesday, along with several tools for protecting the use of GenAI itself.

“Today, the security we can give [to] customers is now enabled by various forms of machine learning and AI to make sure that we are using the bleeding-edge technologies to protect you — which we are concerned that bad actors might use to attack you,” CEO Nikesh Arora said during comments at the announcement event. “The only way to fight AI is with AI.”

Meanwhile, Palo Alto Networks also announced a number of new tools for protecting the use of GenAI itself, including AI Access Security for securing the use of AI apps; AI-SPM (security posture management) for identifying vulnerabilities in AI models; and AI Runtime Security for securing against runtime threats such as prompt injections.

Additionally, Palo Alto Networks announced three copilot assistants powered by GenAI — Strata Copilot, Prisma Cloud Copilot and Cortex Copilot.

Dozens Of Companies Sign Secure by Design Pledge

CISA announced its Secure by Design pledge, which signifies that a software maker will commit to building enhanced security into their products. More than 50 vendors, including many in the cybersecurity industry, have signed the pledge so far.

Initial signatories in the cybersecurity space include Cisco, Microsoft, Google, Palo Alto Networks, Trellix, Proofpoint, Okta, Fortinet, Sophos, Zscaler, SentinelOne, Qualys and Rapid7. Trellix CEO Bryan Palma told CRN that it was important for the company to sign the pledge and he was glad to see a number of other companies in the security space making the commitment as well.

Accenture, Mandiant Announce Partnership

Accenture and Mandiant announced a major collaboration that will see the two organizations work together closely around delivery of cyber resilience services. One component of the partnership will see Accenture leveraging Mandiant’s threat intelligence capabilities going forward.

“We’re going to now be using that data as our primary source,” alongside threat intelligence gathered from Accenture’s own investigations and managed XDR platform, said Robert Boyce, a managing director and global lead for cyber-resilience services at Accenture. Then, Accenture will work to “help organizations operationalize that data so that it’s meaningful to them within their business context, which is super important,” Boyce said.

Abnormal Security Expands Beyond Email Security

Abnormal Security announced the expansion of its AI-powered behavioral analysis capabilities to additional segments outside of email. Newly announced integrations include products in the areas of identity and collaboration, as well as with the three major cloud infrastructure providers.

“I think that really marks an inflection point for Abnormal as we move from an email security company, to a company that is more broadly protecting people across all cloud platforms,” Abnormal Security co-founder and CEO Evan Reiser told CRN during an interview at RSAC.

Wiz Lands $1B In Funding

Cloud and AI security vendor Wiz on Tuesday announced $1 billion in new funding at a $12 billion valuation as the four-year-old company seeks to accelerate its rapid growth and continue its M&A activities.

The massive funding round was led by major names of Silicon Valley venture capital including Andreessen Horowitz and Lightspeed Venture Partners. It comes after Wiz co-founder and CEO Assaf Rappaport recently told CRN that Wiz is pursuing an intensified push with channel partners for its next stage of growth.

Wiz said Tuesday that the new funding will bolster the continued expansion of its Cloud Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP) while helping the company advance toward an initial public offering.

Secureworks Unveils NDR Offering

Secureworks launched its Taegis NDR (network detection and response) offering on Wednesday at RSAC 2024.

Amid the explosion in network traffic, Taegis NDR “doesn’t just provide that complete picture of traffic entering and exiting at the edge, but also all internal traffic between endpoints,” Secureworks CEO Wendy Thomas (pictured) told CRN. “And it has a prevention piece to it, too. What we’ve seen is that it prevents 99 percent of the threat activity on the network.”

Proofpoint Announces New LLM-Based Detection Capabilities

Proofpoint unveiled new capabilities for its email security offerings including LLM-based detection that analyzes emails prior to delivery, as well as after delivery and at the time of a click. The new capabilities take just milliseconds to analyze emails before they are delivered, Proofpoint CEO Sumit Dhawan told CRN during an interview at RSAC.

But then, “our models keep running post-delivery so that we can keep checking — and within a minute after delivery, before someone has read [an email], we can take it out. That’s an industry-first,” Dhawan said.

Vendors Announce CrowdStrike Integrations

A number of security vendors at RSAC 2024 unveiled integrations with key offerings from cybersecurity giant CrowdStrike, including endpoint management provider NinjaOne. The integration for NinjaOne with CrowdStrike’s Falcon XDR platform will enable organizations to “rapidly detect, investigate and stop attacks targeting endpoints while bridging gaps between IT and security teams,” the companies said in a statement.

Meanwhile, Dragos and Vectra AI both announced integrations with CrowdStrike’s Falcon Next-Gen SIEM, as the CrowdStrike offering became generally available this week. Dragos OT threat intelligence is now being integrated into the Next-Gen SIEM platform from CrowdStrike, the companies said. And Vectra AI announced that its Attack Signal Intelligence offering has been integrated with CrowdStrike’s Next-Gen SIEM system.

SentinelOne Unveils Auto-Investigation

SentinelOne debuted a major new automated investigation capability on its Singularity Platform, powered by its Purple AI technology. Auto-Investigation is “where Purple is conducting the investigation on your behalf,” Ric Smith, SentinelOne’s chief product and technology officer, told CRN.

Today, Security Operations Center teams are “hyper-burdened with alerts,” Smith said. “We’re trying to make it such that this [technology] can go through and deal with the investigation on behalf of the analyst. It’s basically burning down that backlog and burning down risk, which has never been done before.”

Akamai To Acquire Noname Security

Akamai Technologies on Tuesday announced a deal to acquire API security firm Noname Security for $450 million. The company said the acquisition of Noname will allow Akamai to “extend protection across all API traffic locations.”

A major focus of the acquisition is on offering improved discovery of “shadow” APIs as well as detection of API vulnerabilities and attacks, Akamai said in a news release.

In an interview with CRN last fall, Akamai co-founder and CEO Tom Leighton said the company has been seeing strong results in API security, aided by its prior acquisition of Neosec. “We’re seeing a ton of interest in our customer base there,” Leighton said at the time.