Two major conferences loom large on the US cybersecurity events calendar: The RSA Conference and Black Hat.
RSA was launched in 1991 by then CEO Jim Bidzos of RSA Data Security, the encryption company founded by Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard Adleman. Originally, the conference had a cryptography focus, but that all changed in 2005 when Bill Gates, then CEO of Microsoft, gave a keynote presentation. With that one presentation, RSA broadened its focus to include all things enterprise security. In 1991, a few dozen people attended RSA. This year, nearly 44,000 showed up.
Black Hat also started with a practitioner’s perspective, back in 1997. It seemed that the true “hacker” spirit of Defc...