Reporting from Vegas: Networking, AI, and good boys

Joe’s on-the-ground report from Cisco Live U.S. is here, complete with therapy dog pictures and tips on handling conference overstimulation.

Welcome to this week’s edition of the Threat Source newsletter.   Howdy friends, and hello from Cisco Live U. S. , here in sunny (and very hot) Las Vegas!    An interesting quirk of being sent to one of these events is you learn to understand your limits as a person. Cisco Live is a three-day event, and it encompasses so many people, partners, workshops, CTFs (!! ), and symposiums. I can confidently say that here on day three, I’ve had rarely a moment’s rest and, as they say, my dogs are barking.

   Speaking of dogs, did you know that at Cisco Live we have therapy dogs? Healing Hounds is a local Las Vegas therapy dog volunteer group, and Splunk sponsored them this year. Every two hours, the goodest boys and girls rotate in and you can stop what you are doing to immediately go give them pets. Look at these cute faces. LOOK AT THEM. Back to limits. One thing I’ve discovered is that conferences like this can be loud . I don’t mind loud. Loud is fine. But eight hours of noise at high levels is stressful.

So, I use my Apple AirPods in noise cancelling mode, and it keeps even a massive conference like CLUS to a very manageable dull roar. If you own a pair, or any earplugs, trust me. Use them. It’s not going to shut out the world, but it will give you more stamina in an environment with bright lights and loud noises. With that much stimuli for an extended period, you must create some space for yourself. Conferences that have quiet or chill spaces, shout out to you! A place for humans to find a moment of rest in the endurance contest that is a technology convention is a wonderful thing. So what is the vibe at CLUS? AI. All the AI.

Not from a product perspective, but from an infrastructure and security perspective. How do folks plan to move and manage that much data, especially in an agentic world? It’s a hot debate, given what I’ve listened to so far. Every business is struggling with it in their own ways, and conferences like CLUS are good opportunities to put those companies in the same room and ideate on ways to process and defend in an AI world. We’re talking many hundreds of zettabytes of data daily, the kind of data pipelines the entire world runs on. At that scale, the challenge is just wild and almost incomprehensible.

I’m glad I could help and be a part of those discussions. As the summer starts, the great patchening is coming as vendors start issuing rapid patches and CVE advisories. This is the quiet before the storm, so enjoy these cute dog photos! Black Hat and DEF CON are around the corner, as well! And always find time during these fire drills to take care of yourself, and if you can, pet some dogs.