Every year, RSAC sets a theme. And most years, the theme gets lost in the keynotes. Nobody remembers it once they leave.
This year was different.
The 2026 theme "Power of Community" carries an old proverb at its heart: "If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together."
For anyone working in threat intelligence, that is not just a nice idea but something learned the hard way.
Most organizations today have more security data than they can process. Feeds, alerts, vendor reports, threat bulletins. Volume is not the problem.
The problem is that most of this intelligence arrives after hours of validation effort, or in a form that requires so much interpretation that, by the time a team has validated the signal, cross-referenced, and circulated it internally, the window for action has closed.
This is the central tension in cybersecurity right now. Not a shortage of data. A shortage of shared, expert, verified intelligence that arrives in time.
Advanced persistent threats, the kind that sit undetected inside networks for months before executing, succeed precisely because they exploit this gap. They move slowly. They study their targets. They operate with a patience that reactive, siloed defenses were never designed to handle.
RSAC 2026 drew together thousands of security practitioners. Tracks will cover everything from zero-trust architecture to AI-driven threat detection, OT and ICS vulnerabilities, ransomware response, and regulatory compliance.
A wide range. But the underlying issue was consistent: no single organization, vendor, or government agency sees the whole picture alone.
Take zero-day exploits. The speed at which a newly discovered vulnerability moves from proof-of-concept to active weaponization has compressed dramatically. Threat actors are faster. Toolkits are more accessible. The window between a vendor publishing a patch and an attacker exploiting it is now measured in hours, not weeks.
No single team, however skilled, can track every emerging vector across every relevant sector simultaneously.
The practitioners who respond fastest share one trait: they are embedded in networks of trust. Intelligence flows before it becomes public. A colleague in a different sector flags something they recognize from three months ago. The information is backed by context.
And it is what RSAC, with this year's theme, is pushing the industry to confront directly.
The IT and cybersecurity community is grounded in a culture of collaboration. Whether it’s sharing analysis of a new malware strain, a detection method, or a newly launched phishing campaign, each contribution helps strengthen the collective good.
Roxane Suau
The argument for community intelligence is not new. ISACs have existed for decades.
And yet for most security teams, particularly those outside large enterprises, the benefits remain theoretical. The intelligence exists somewhere. Accessing it in a timely, relevant, and immediately actionable form remains genuinely hard.
Part of the problem is the process. Traditional threat intelligence workflows were designed for organizations with dedicated analysts, who stand up structured programs and run on platforms that require substantial configuration and maintenance. They were not designed for a security lead at a mid-sized company who needs to know right now whether a campaign hitting their sector is relevant to their stack.
The other part is trust. The challenge of knowing which sources and intel to actually trust. The information is out there. Knowing what to believe and act on is a different problem entirely.
The result is a common sense of intelligence that is chronically underfunded. Rich in theory. Thin in practice.
What changes the discussion is when intelligence is structured so that sharing does not require exposure. When analyst expertise can be embedded into responses, not only referenced. When the AI layer does not replace human judgment but allows it to reach further and faster with less friction between question and answer.
At Askeal, this is what we have created
An AI-powered cybersecurity assistant that is continuously enriched by the collective expertise of the community. Every interaction, validated insight and every piece of contextual judgment contributed by our network strengthens what each user receives in return.
The community benefits from the platform and powers it.
That distinction is necessary because most AI security tools are built on the same publicly available data. The same reported incidents. The same published research. They're limited by what's already been published.
We are building something that gets smarter with every expert contributor. Responses carry real weight because they come from practitioners who have seen what they describe.
RSAC chose it's Theme well. Going far in cybersecurity means building the kind of shared knowledge infrastructure that attackers have always assumed defenders would not bother to create.
It turns out that assumption is worth proving wrong.
Askeal is built on the premise that the best cybersecurity intelligence does not come from one vendor's lab. It comes from the collective expertise of practitioners willing to contribute what they know.
The best cybersecurity intelligence does not come from one source but from the people closest to the problem. Contributors include: vendors with direct product and threat data, researchers and research labs with deep technical analysis, and independent experts with hands-on field perspective. If you believe the industry gets stronger when it shares, join us!