Jen Easterly, a longtime public- and private-sector cybersecurity practitioner who led the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency for more than three years, has been appointed CEO of RSA Conference, known as RSAC.
The organization puts on the prominent annual gathering of cybersecurity experts, vendors, and researchers that started in 1991 as a small cryptography event hosted by the corporate security giant RSA. RSAC is now a separate company with events and initiatives throughout the year, but its conference in San Francisco is still its flagship offering with tens of thousands of attendees each spring.
“The conference is the crown jewel, but now we are also a year-round global membership entity for cyber professionals,” Easterly tells WIRED. “We are internationalizing more deeply and I’m excited to expand the innovation sandbox, the early stage expo and startup ecosystem, and that’s really about supporting the next generation of AI-driven cyber companies and secure by design innovators to produce high-quality software. In many ways we are living through an inflection point.”
Easterly’s appointment as CEO certainly comes at a moment of great transition for the cybersecurity industry. AI tools are beginning to enhance the capabilities of both attackers and defenders, and security experts have a crucial role to play in securing AI platforms themselves along with the infrastructure supporting the services. At the same time, the Trump administration’s stark alterations to US foreign and domestic policy seem poised to alter private-sector cybersecurity and public-private partnerships in North America and around the world.
Easterly emphasizes that she is a lifelong independent and that cybersecurity crosses all administrations and borders. She had multiple deployments in the US Army, worked for the National Security Agency, helped establish US Cyber Command within the Department of Defense, and spent nearly five years in charge of Morgan Stanley’s global cybersecurity, all before joining CISA in 2021.
Trust building and collaboration have been some of the most important priorities of her career. But the Trump administration did not ask her to stay on at CISA during the transition at the end of 2024, and President Donald Trump has extensively criticized the election integrity work CISA had been doing under her leadership and that of her predecessor, Chris Krebs. Separately, in July, the Army directed the Military Academy at West Point to rescind an employment offer it had made to Easterly to become the Robert F. McDermott Distinguished Chair of the academy’s Department of Social Sciences.
“I don’t approach this leadership opportunity at RSAC through the lens of fear and speculation, I approach it with the same relentless optimism and belief in the power of community that’s been at the center of my service, public and private,” Easterly says. “Cybersecurity is not a political endeavor, RSAC is certainly not a political organization, and I am not a political person. I am a lifelong independent.”
Easterly says that RSA Conference will continue to welcome insights and collaboration from officials of all governments as part of its efforts to facilitate community building and collaboration in cybersecurity. And she says that there is “magic” that can happen when the security community has supportive forums to come together.
“Security and resilience are issues that affect every country, every industry, every citizen,” she adds. “And RSAC’s strength is that it brings together operators and technologists and innovators and researchers and policymakers across administrations and across borders precisely because it is grounded in expertise and mission, not in politics.”
