It has been another whirlwind period of events for theCUBE, with Fal.Con and mWISE Conference now in the books. Both events focused on the cybersecurity landscape, as AI and threat actors continue to dominate the news.

In fact, just last week, as the Fal.Con and mWISE events wrapped up, a ransomware attack crippled services at MGM Resorts International Inc. Services at the hotels and casinos owned by MGM have now mostly been restored. What was most interesting was the “inside baseball” being shared by experts on the show floors, according to theCUBE industry analyst John Furrier (pictured, left).

“Here’s the thing in the cybersecurity world, where the warfare has been going on: It’s well-documented. Everyone does these pen tests; they do SOC reviews,” Furrier said on the latest episode of theCUBE Podcast. “The security operations center is becoming less important because the hackers are going to zero-day exploits and actually social engineering, which has nothing to do with pen testing or anything else.”

The MGM hack represented a failure in process that someone could call up and get someone else’s password. The SOC analyst experience is lacking, according to theCUBE industry analyst Dave Vellante (right).

“It’s like air traffic controllers. They’re sitting all day, they burn out fast and very short lifecycle, so that SOC analyst experience has to improve,” Vellante said. “That was one of the big things that CrowdStrike [Fal.Con] was. They had this thing called Charlotte AI, which was basically a natural language interface to dramatically improve the SOC analyst experience.”

Still, the SOC experience is not as relevant as it was before for two reasons, according to Furrier. The first reason, as mentioned, has to do with zero-day exploits being leveraged.

“It kind of implies that the SOC is kind of working because you have to go to zero-days and social engineering,” Furrier said. “The second reason why SOCs are under pressure is that some of the technology is old, antiquated, a little bit outdated. You’ve got refresh issues operationally. Then, things are changing in terms of the data model.”

Thoughts on Cisco buying Splunk

This week, networking giant Cisco Systems Inc. announced a $28 billion deal to buy cybersecurity and data observation and analysis company Splunk Inc. It was the biggest acquisition in the company’s nearly 39-year history.

Splunk had been a “walking dead” company for nearly three years, according to Furrier. That’s a far cry from where the company had been when theCUBE first started, with the three hottest companies being Splunk, Tableau Software LLC and ServiceNow Inc., Vellante noted.

“[Splunk has] an awesome customer base. There’s a lot of criticism around pricing, with Splunk kind of being the Oracle of log metrics and so forth,” he said. “Big problem with cloud, they didn’t really have a great cloud strategy. The second thing was that they had to transition to ARR. That was painful. It always is painful, and they didn’t do such a great job of it.”

Why did Cisco buy Splunk? It’s because it is a cash cow.

“If they get $4 billion in ARR, Cisco has got like 40% of its revenue,” Vellante said. “Now, it’s coming from software subscriptions, which is huge. And Splunk, you pointed this out to me yesterday, we heard on the call, only a third of the Splunk revenue was overseas.”

A rant on Amazon and the FTC

More information was provided this past week on the FTC’s suit against Amazon.com Inc., naming three individuals targeted. The FTC is going after Amazon for deceptive Prime products or practices, Vellante noted.

“Here’s my rant. The average credit card interest rate in the United States is 22.75%. But if you’re a new customer, you can get in for 20.68%. OK, well, this is criminal, the average credit card debt is, for an American, just under $8,000,” Vellante said. “You’re talking about, at that rate, 20-plus percent. You’re talking about $1,700 a year in interest payments.”

The cost of Prime is $180 a year, Vellante noted. While one can’t cancel their credit card debt, they can figure out how to cancel their Prime by pushing a button and being done with $180 a year.

“This is bullshit that the government is coming down so hard on big tech, when these banks are just ripping off the American consumer, allowing them to raise all this debt or take on all this debt, take on all this water, particularly when interest rates were zero and back then they were charging 18%,” Vellante said. “Why not go after [them]? If you really want to protect the consumer? I mean, this is so disingenuous in my opinion.”

Watch the full podcast below to find out why these industry pros were mentioned:

Juan Loaiza, EVP at Oracle
Anton Chuvakin, senior security staff for the office of the CISO for Google Cloud at Google
Allie Mellen, principal analyst at Forrester Research
Kevin Mandia, CEO of Mandiant
George Kurtz, CEO of CrowdStrike
Bill McDermott, chairman and CEO of ServiceNow
Erik Bradley, chief strategist and director of research at ETR
Jeremy Burton, CEO of Observe
Adam Selipsky, CEO of AWS
Frank Slootman, chairman and CEO of Snowflake
John Donahoe, president and CEO of Nike
Gary Steele, president and CEO of Splunk
Doug Merritt, chairman, CEO and president of Aviatrix
Shawn Bice, CVP of cloud ecosystem security at Microsoft
Charlie Bell, EVP for security at Microsoft
Clint Sharp, co-founder and CEO of Cribl
Zeus Kerravala, founder and principal analyst at ZK Research
Liz Centoni, EVP and GM for applications and CSO of Cisco
Jeetu Patel, EVP and GM of the Security and Collaboration Business Units at Cisco
Chuck Robbins, chair and CEO of Cisco
Andy Jassy, president and CEO of Amazon
Jason Calacanis, internet entrepreneur, angel investor and author
Eric L. Nielsen, senior director for marketing at VMware
John Troyer, principal product manager at Oracle
Hock Tan, president and CEO of Broadcom
Neil Lindsay, SVP for health services at Amazon
Russell Grandinetti, SVP for international consumer at Amazon
Bill Gurley, general partner at Benchmark
Brad Gerstner, founder and CEO of Altimeter Capital
Chamath Palihapitiya, CEO of Social Capital
Vivek Ramaswamy, U.S. presidential candidate
Donald Trump, 45th president of the United States
Joe Biden, 46th president of the United States
Larry Ellison, chairman of the board and CTO of Oracle
Crawford Del Prete, president at IDC
Pat Gelsinger, CEO of Intel
Tim Cook, CEO 0f Apple
Robert Hof, editor-in-chief at SiliconANGLE Media

Don’t miss out on the latest episodes of “theCUBE Pod.” Join us by subscribing to our RSS feed. You can also listen to us on Apple Podcasts or on Spotify. And for those who prefer to watch, check out our YouTube playlist.

Photo: SiliconANGLE