Innovative RSA Cybersecurity Tools Tackle Deepfakes and Data Exfiltration

Key points

• RSA Conference announcements: New tools for deepfake detection and for encrypting data to stop exfiltration.
• Deepfake detection: Vendors say their tools find manipulated media faster and more accurately.
• Data exfiltration: New encryption products aim to keep data protected while it moves.
• Partnerships: Companies, researchers and government agencies are working together on these tools.
• Who is building them: Large vendors and startups both showed new products.

Two threats on the RSAC show floor

Every new technology brings new ways to attack it. At the 2025 RSA Conference in San Francisco, two threats drew particular attention from vendors: deepfakes and data exfiltration. Here is what was on show, and how much of it to believe.

Deepfake detection at RSAC

Deepfakes use AI to produce fake video and audio that look and sound real. They have been used to impersonate executives on calls and to push fraudulent payments. Several tools shown at the conference claim to spot manipulated media more accurately and in less time.

Accuracy claims are worth testing before buying. Ask vendors how their tools perform on recent deepfake methods, and how often they flag genuine recordings by mistake.

Encryption against data exfiltration

Companies move enormous volumes of data between offices and cloud services every hour. That traffic is a target. New encryption products shown at RSAC are designed to keep data encrypted end to end, so that intercepted or stolen files are useless to whoever takes them.

Encryption only helps if the keys are managed well. A tool that encrypts everything but leaves keys on the same compromised server adds little protection.

Research partnerships

Many of the tools came out of partnerships between technology companies and research institutions, sometimes with government funding. These arrangements help move research out of the lab and into products faster.

They also spread the cost of research that few companies could fund alone.

Who showed new tools

Large companies like IBM and Cisco presented new products alongside a crop of startups. Some focused on immediate fixes. Others pitched tools for threats that are only starting to appear.

Big vendors offer scale and integration. Startups often move faster on narrow problems like deepfake detection.

What security teams should do next

New tools are only useful once they are deployed and tuned. For security teams, the work after RSAC is less glamorous: test the claims and check how a product fits existing systems. Then decide whether it solves a problem you actually have.

A short pilot with your own data is the quickest way to find out whether a conference demo holds up.

Frank Jones, CISSP

Frank Jones has loved computers from the age of 13. Frank got his hacking career started when he downloaded a war dialing program that he used to detect dial up modems in his hometown of Chicago. Frank Jones now works as a JAVA coder and cyber security researcher.