Cisco Safety and Splunk Safety launched the Findings Report from the Safety Operations Middle at RSAC 2026 Convention.
This yr marked the tenth yr of the SOC at RSAC. Since 2017, the mission has stayed constant: defend 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 greater. We weren’t but working a completely 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 Stay Americas 2026.
RSAC is a uniquely worthwhile setting for studying. The Moscone Middle wi-fi community is open and unsecured, just like the networks folks use each day in resorts, airports, espresso outlets, and main occasions. The SOC doesn’t decrypt encrypted visitors. As an alternative, the workforce makes use of community telemetry, DNS visibility, packet seize, risk intelligence, and built-in safety instruments to determine danger, examine suspicious exercise, and assist attendees higher defend themselves.
For RSAC 2026, the workforce 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 companion (alphaMountain, Pulsedive and StealthMole) and neighborhood risk intelligence sources.
The complete report contains the small print, however a couple of 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, searching, 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 swap consoles to know what occurred.
Second, automation diminished toil. Cleartext credentials continued to look on the community, however the workforce 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 through the occasion and created a repeatable mannequin for future conferences.
Third, encrypted visitors remained each successful and a problem. Encryption helps defend attendee privateness, and the SOC doesn’t decrypt attendee visitors. However defenders nonetheless want methods to determine threats. Cisco Safe Firewall’s Encrypted Visibility Engine helped the workforce discover significant indicators 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 utility utilization and to assist defend on-premises AI fashions operating within the SOC in a Field. On the identical time, the workforce noticed that AI demonstrations and agentic functions can introduce danger when they’re constructed or operated with out primary safe communication controls.
Lastly, the human mission of the SOC remained the identical. The report contains examples of unintentional knowledge publicity, insecure e-mail, unsecured net functions, misconfigured entry paths, uncovered storage, phishing infrastructure, rip-off domains, and malware investigations. In every case, the objective was not solely to detect the problem, however to assist RSAC and affected attendees perceive and cut back the danger.
That’s the reason the total Findings Report issues. It isn’t only a checklist of alerts. It’s a discipline report from a stay, high-pressure SOC working in an actual convention setting, the place know-how, course of, automation, AI, and human judgment all must work collectively.
Obtain the total RSAC 2026 SOC Findings Report back to see the structure, metrics, investigations, classes realized, and proposals from the tenth yr of the SOC.
The core recommendation stays easy: encrypt, encrypt, by no means belief, and all the time confirm.
Our due to the engineers, analysts and companions who made the SOC potential.
Watch the recorded presentation ‘PROTECTED: The seventh Annual Report from the SOC at RSAC’ (RSAC subscription required).
