Cisco Safety and Splunk Safety launched the Findings Report from the Safety Operations Heart at RSAC 2026 Convention.
This 12 months marked the tenth 12 months of the SOC at RSAC. Since 2017, the mission has stayed constant: shield the convention community, educate attendees about what occurs on an open wi-fi community, and innovate with new integrations, workflows, and safety operations practices.
The 2026 SOC was additionally an essential step towards one thing larger. We weren’t but working a totally agentic SOC at RSAC 2026, however the basis was taking form: built-in telemetry, automated escalation, full packet proof, AI-protected workflows, and a closed-loop working mannequin between Cisco XDR and Splunk Enterprise Safety. These classes helped inform the Agentic SOC work that adopted at Cisco Reside Americas 2026.
RSAC is a uniquely priceless surroundings for studying. The Moscone Heart wi-fi community is open and unsecured, just like the networks folks use day-after-day in resorts, airports, espresso retailers, and main occasions. The SOC doesn’t decrypt encrypted site visitors. As an alternative, the crew makes use of community telemetry, DNS visibility, packet seize, menace intelligence, and built-in safety instruments to establish danger, examine suspicious exercise, and assist attendees higher shield themselves.
For RSAC 2026, the crew deployed the SOC in a Field structure, connecting Endace full packet seize, Splunk Enterprise Safety, Cisco XDR, Cisco Safe Firewall, Cisco Safe Entry, Cisco AI Protection, ThousandEyes, Splunk Assault Analyzer, Cisco Safe Malware Analytics, Cisco Talos intelligence, and associate (alphaMountain, Pulsedive and StealthMole) and neighborhood menace intelligence sources.
The complete report contains the small print, however just a few themes stood out.
First, integration modified how the SOC labored. Cisco XDR supported environment friendly triage and correlation, whereas Splunk Enterprise Safety supported deeper investigation, looking, enrichment, and reporting. Splunk SOAR helped join the workflow in order that context might transfer between methods as an alternative of forcing analysts to manually re-enter proof or change consoles to grasp what occurred.
Second, automation decreased toil. Cleartext credentials continued to seem on the community, however the crew superior the response mannequin from standalone scripting to an built-in Splunk SOAR workflow. Detections turned formal findings in Splunk Enterprise Safety, and the playbook might notify affected customers, replace the discovering, and shut the case. That saved greater than 9 hours of analyst time in the course of the occasion and created a repeatable mannequin for future conferences.
Third, encrypted site visitors remained each a hit and a problem. Encryption helps shield attendee privateness, and the SOC doesn’t decrypt attendee site visitors. However defenders nonetheless want methods to establish threats. Cisco Safe Firewall’s Encrypted Visibility Engine helped the crew discover significant alerts in encrypted periods with out decryption, together with exercise that supported a malware investigation and response.
Fourth, AI turned a part of the safety story in two methods. The SOC used Cisco AI Protection to realize visibility into generative AI software utilization and to assist shield on-premises AI fashions operating within the SOC in a Field. On the similar time, the crew noticed that AI demonstrations and agentic purposes can introduce danger when they’re constructed or operated with out fundamental safe communication controls.
Lastly, the human mission of the SOC remained the identical. The report contains examples of unintended knowledge publicity, insecure e mail, unsecured net purposes, misconfigured entry paths, uncovered storage, phishing infrastructure, rip-off domains, and malware investigations. In every case, the aim was not solely to detect the problem, however to assist RSAC and affected attendees perceive and cut back the chance.
That’s the reason the total Findings Report issues. It isn’t only a listing of alerts. It’s a discipline report from a dwell, high-pressure SOC working in an actual convention surroundings, the place expertise, course of, automation, AI, and human judgment all should work collectively.
Obtain the total RSAC 2026 SOC Findings Report back to see the structure, metrics, investigations, classes discovered, and proposals from the tenth 12 months of the SOC.
The core recommendation stays easy: encrypt, encrypt, by no means belief, and at all times confirm.
Our due to the engineers, analysts and companions who made the SOC attainable.
Watch the recorded presentation ‘PROTECTED: The seventh Annual Report from the SOC at RSAC’ (RSAC subscription required).
