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 larger. 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 precious surroundings for studying. The Moscone Middle wi-fi community is open and unsecured, just like the networks individuals use each day in inns, airports, espresso retailers, and main occasions. The SOC doesn’t decrypt encrypted site visitors. As a substitute, the staff makes use of community telemetry, DNS visibility, packet seize, menace intelligence, and built-in safety instruments to establish threat, examine suspicious exercise, and assist attendees higher defend themselves.
For RSAC 2026, the staff 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 accomplice (alphaMountain, Pulsedive and StealthMole) and group menace intelligence sources.
The complete report consists of the main points, however a number 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 programs as a substitute of forcing analysts to manually re-enter proof or swap consoles to grasp what occurred.
Second, automation diminished toil. Cleartext credentials continued to look on the community, however the staff superior the response mannequin from standalone scripting to an built-in Splunk SOAR workflow. Detections grew to become 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 successful and a problem. Encryption helps defend 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 staff discover significant alerts in encrypted periods with out decryption, together with exercise that supported a malware investigation and response.
Fourth, AI grew to become 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 defend on-premises AI fashions operating within the SOC in a Field. On the identical time, the staff noticed that AI demonstrations and agentic functions can introduce threat when they’re constructed or operated with out fundamental safe communication controls.
Lastly, the human mission of the SOC remained the identical. The report consists of examples of unintentional information publicity, insecure electronic mail, unsecured internet 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 difficulty, however to assist RSAC and affected attendees perceive and cut back the chance.
That’s the reason the complete Findings Report issues. It isn’t only a listing of alerts. It’s a area report from a stay, high-pressure SOC working in an actual convention surroundings, the place expertise, course of, automation, AI, and human judgment all need to work collectively.
Obtain the complete RSAC 2026 SOC Findings Report back to see the structure, metrics, investigations, classes discovered, and suggestions from the tenth yr 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 doable.
Watch the recorded presentation ‘PROTECTED: The seventh Annual Report from the SOC at RSAC’ (RSAC subscription required).
