Summarizing the RSA Conference expo

I like detective stories; I read them, I write them; but I do not believe them. The bones and structure of a good detective story are so old and well known that it may seem banal to state them even in outline. A policeman, stupid but sweet-tempered, and always weakly erring on the side of mercy, walks along the street; and in the course of his ordinary business finds a man in Bulgarian uniform killed with an Australian boomerang in a Brompton milk-shop. Having set free all the most suspicious persons in the story, he then appeals to the bull-dog professional detective, who appeals to the hawk-like amateur detective. The latter finds near the corpse a boot-lace, a button-boot, a French newspaper, and a return ticket from the Hebrides; and so, relentlessly, link by link, brings the crime home to the Archbishop of Canterbury.

G.K.Chesterton, Illustrated London News, May 6, 1911

If Chesterton he were around today, he would probably have enjoyed this year's RSA Conference. If he had attended it, he might have noticed that it was fairly easy to summarize many of the pitches that you heard on the expo floor. He might even have felt compelled to comment on them. The pitches of most the vendors in the expo went roughly like this:

More than <random big number> data breaches occur each <random unit of time> causing over <random big number> dollars each year

Source: <reference to an analyst report that’s too vague to actually verify>

And the only way to stop this massive problem is to buy my products

I'm sure that some of the products that I saw at this year's conference are actually very useful for stopping data breaches, but it was hard to take some of the claims seriously. I know that I really can be PCI compliant without buying the equivalent of secure fuzzy dice, after all.