Page 214 - Cyber Defense eMagazine RSAC Special Edition 2025

On Constant Community Improvements

By Maxime Lamothe-Brassard, Founder and CEO, LimaCharlie

The theme of this year’s RSAC is “Many Voices. One Community.” While our field can rightly claim “many
voices”, portraying it as a “community” is a bit of a stretch. By this, I mean countless cybersecurity vendors
hawking proprietary solutions will be attending RSAC, but they are competitors, not players on a common
team. Each vendor wants to capture as much of the cybersecurity market as they can and this economic
reality hinders true community building.

To be clear, there is no hard and fast definition of what constitutes a community. The Cambridge
dictionary defines community as: the people living in one particular area or people who are considered
as a unit because of their common interests, social group, or nationality. In its broadest sense, one could
argue our community has a common interest in cybersecurity. By this same definition, we all belong to
the pro-breathing, pro-hydration, and pro-sheltering communities.

Simply put, when the definition of a community includes everyone, the word loses some meaning. My
point is not to engage in a pedantic argument over the term community. Rather, I plan to demonstrate
that where cybersecurity efforts are community-driven, they thrive. Likewise, when cybersecurity is done
individually, opaquely, and in isolation, it often flounders.

For example, public and open-source projects such as VirusTotal, Wireshark, Metasploit, and OWASP
provide critical resources to our field. Individuals with an interest in cybersecurity support and manage
these efforts in a non-competitive way that makes them useful for everyone. By contrast, cybersecurity
companies have little motivation to make their solutions play well with competitor’s products. This is a

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