Former CISA Director Jen Easterly Will Lead RSA Conference

The longtime cybersecurity professional says she’s taking the helm of the legacy security organization at “an inflection point” for tech and the world beyond.

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 ...