Former CISA Director Jen Easterly Will Lead RSAC Conference

Jen Easterly, a A longtime public and private sector cybersecurity practitioner, who led the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency for more than three years, has been named CEO of the RSAC Conference, known as RSAC.

The organization hosts a major annual gathering of cybersecurity experts, vendors and researchers that began in 1991 as a small crypto event hosted by enterprise security giant RSA. RSAC is now a separate company with events and initiatives throughout the year, but its conference in San Francisco remains its flagship offering with tens of thousands of attendees each spring.

“The conference is the crown jewel, but we are now also a year-round global entity for cyber professionals,” Easterly told WIRED. “We’re going deeper international and I’m excited to expand the innovation sandbox, early exposure and startup ecosystem, and it’s really about supporting the next generation of AI-enabled cyber businesses and secure-by-design innovators to produce high-quality software. In many ways, we’re at an inflection point.”

Easterly’s appointment as CEO certainly comes at a time of great transition for the cybersecurity industry. AI tools are beginning to improve the capabilities of attackers and defenders, and security experts have a crucial role to play in securing the AI ​​platforms themselves as well as the infrastructure supporting the services. At the same time, the Trump administration’s sweeping changes to U.S. foreign and domestic policy appear poised to alter private sector cybersecurity and public-private partnerships in North America and around the world.

Easterly emphasizes that it has always been independent and that cybersecurity crosses all jurisdictions and borders. She completed multiple deployments in the U.S. military, worked for the National Security Agency, helped create U.S. Cyber ​​Command within the Department of Defense, and spent nearly five years in charge of global cybersecurity at Morgan Stanley, all before joining CISA in 2021.

Building trust and collaboration have been among the most important priorities of his career. But the Trump administration has not asked him to stay on at CISA during the transition at the end of 2024, and President Donald Trump has widely criticized the election integrity work done by CISA under his leadership and that of his predecessor, Chris Krebs. Separately, in July, the Army ordered the West Point Military Academy to rescind a job offer it had made to Easterly to become the Robert F. McDermott Distinguished Chairman of the academy’s social sciences department.

“I am not approaching this leadership opportunity at RSAC through the lens of fear and speculation, I am approaching it with the same relentless optimism and belief in the power of community that has been at the center of my service, public and private,” Easterly says. “Cybersecurity is not a political enterprise, the RSAC is certainly not a political organization and I am not a political person. I am a lifelong independent.”

Easterly says the RSAC conference will continue to welcome ideas and collaboration from officials across governments as it seeks to facilitate community building and collaboration on cybersecurity. And she says there’s “magic” that can happen when the security community has supportive forums to come together.

“Security and resilience are issues that affect every country, every industry, every citizen,” she adds. “And the strength of the RSAC is that it brings together operators, technologists, innovators, researchers and policy makers across jurisdictions and across borders, precisely because it is based on expertise and mission, not politics.

Updated 9 a.m. ET, January 15, 2026: Clarification that RSA Conference LLC’s flagship event has now been renamed the RSAC Conference.