RSAC, Security Staff Acquisition & Development

Rage room is a smash hit — literally — as security pros vent their frustrations

Security professions often have to spin many plates at once. But sometimes it’s more satisfying to smash one.

That’s why at the 2022 RSA Conference in San Francisco on Wednesday, cyber firms Panther and Tines hosted a “smash room” where attendees could write their biggest work stressors and frustrations on an ordinary dish and then demolish it in a quick fit of rage. Not one to miss out on the fun and destruction, SC Media’s Bradley Barth was there to try out the experience himself.

Examples of bugaboos that attendees wrote on their plates included legacy software, the Log4J exploit, and a certain specific vendor product that we won’t name here. Ironically, the plate with Log4J written on it didn’t break. How’s that for a metaphor?

Click here for all the coverage coming out of RSAC.

Panther founder and CEO Jack Naglieri and Tines founder and COO Thomas Kinsella offered up their own predictions what attendees’ top network security complaints would be, citing scalability issues, alert fatigue and “terrible tools.” One of the key causes of these problems is a lack of modernization to many organization’s network security architectures, according to the founders, who intend to change that through Panther’s next-gen SIEM and Tines’ SOAR and automated workflow tools.

“In a lot of ways we’re just bringing tooling into 2022. A lot of the things that we’ve been forced to use for many years were never really designed for the cloud,” said Naglieri. By modernizing, 
“we get over a lot of these frustrations — speed, scale, cost, the ability to automate things in a more intelligent way and use software engineering practices to do our jobs.”

“We’re solving a lot of problems, but really we’re enabling the people behind those problems to solve the problems themselves,” added Kinsella. “You’ve got some really smart people and what you can’t have them doing is spending hours and hours… analyzing alerts in a whole load of different tools. You need to make that quicker.”

By the end of the night, approximately 1,000 plates were smashed, Panther and Tines reported. While participants could write whatever they wanted on their plates, the two companies did provide attendees with some options that were specifically related to network security concerns. According to the vendors, the commonly chosen complaints and challenges from that list were lack of or subpar tools, too many alerts and false positives, and poor work-life balance.

Bradley Barth

As director of multimedia content strategy at CyberRisk Alliance, Bradley Barth develops content for online conferences, webcasts, podcasts video/multimedia projects — often serving as moderator or host. For nearly six years, he wrote and reported for SC Media as deputy editor and, before that, senior reporter. He was previously a program executive with the tech-focused PR firm Voxus. Past journalistic experience includes stints as business editor at Executive Technology, a staff writer at New York Sportscene and a freelance journalist covering travel and entertainment. In his spare time, Bradley also writes screenplays.

Get daily email updates

SC Media's daily must-read of the most current and pressing daily news

By clicking the Subscribe button below, you agree to SC Media Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policy.