RSAC 2025: Cisco and Meta put open-source AI at the heart of threat defense

With cyberattacks accelerating at machine pace, open-source giant language fashions (LLMs) have rapidly turn out to be the infrastructure that allows startups and world cybersecurity leaders to develop and deploy adaptive, cost-effective defenses towards threats that evolve sooner than human analysts can reply.

Open-source LLMs’ preliminary benefits of sooner time-to-market, higher adaptability and decrease price have created a scalable, safe basis for delivering infrastructure. Finally week’s RSAC 2025 convention, Cisco, Meta and ProjectDiscovery introduced new open-source LLMs and a community-driven assault floor innovation that collectively outline the way forward for open-source in cybersecurity.   

One of many key takeaways from this 12 months’s RSAC is the shift in open-source LLMs to increase and strengthen infrastructure at scale.

Open-source AI is on the verge of delivering what many cybersecurity leaders have known as on for years, which is the flexibility of the numerous cybersecurity suppliers to affix forces towards more and more complicated threats. The imaginative and prescient of being collaborators in making a unified, open-source LLM and infrastructure is a step nearer, given the bulletins at RSAC.

Cisco’s Chief Product Officer Jeetu Patel emphasised in his keynote, “The true enemy will not be our competitor. It’s truly the adversary. And we wish to guarantee that we will present every kind of instruments and have the ecosystem band collectively in order that we will truly collectively struggle the adversary.”

Patel defined the urgency of taking over such a posh problem, saying, “AI is essentially altering all the things, and cybersecurity is on the coronary heart of all of it. We’re now not coping with human-scale threats; these assaults are occurring at machine scale.”

Cisco’s Basis-sec-8B LLM defines a brand new period of open-source AI

Cisco’s newly established Foundation AI group originates from the corporate’s latest acquisition of Robust Intelligence. Basis AI’s focus is on delivering domain-specific AI infrastructure tailor-made explicitly to cybersecurity purposes, that are among the many most difficult to unravel. Constructed on Meta’s Llama 3.1 structure, this 8-billion parameter, open-weight Giant Language Mannequin isn’t a retrofitted general-purpose AI. It was purpose-built, meticulously skilled on a cybersecurity-specific dataset curated in-house by Cisco Basis AI.

“By their nature, the issues on this constitution are a number of the most tough ones in AI immediately. To make the know-how accessible, we determined that many of the work we do in Basis AI must be open. Open innovation permits for compounding results throughout the {industry}, and it performs a very essential function within the cybersecurity area,” writes Yaron Singer, VP of AI and Safety at Basis.

With open-source anchoring Basis AI, Cisco has designed an environment friendly architectural strategy for cybersecurity suppliers who usually compete with one another, promoting comparable options, to turn out to be collaborators in creating extra unified, hardened defenses.

Singer writes, “Whether or not you’re embedding it into current instruments or constructing solely new workflows, foundation-sec-8b adapts to your group’s distinctive wants.” Cisco’s blog post asserting the mannequin recommends that safety groups apply foundation-sec-8b throughout the safety lifecycle. Potential use instances Cisco recommends for the mannequin embody SOC acceleration, proactive menace protection, engineering enablement, AI-assisted code opinions, validating configurations and customized integration.

Basis-sec-8B’s weights and tokenizer have been open-sourced beneath the permissive Apache 2.0 license on Hugging Face, permitting enterprise-level customization and deployment with out vendor lock-in, sustaining compliance and privateness controls. Cisco’s blog also notes plans to open-source the training pipeline, additional fostering community-driven innovation.

Cybersecurity is within the LLM’s DNA

Cisco selected to create a cybersecurity-specific mannequin optimized for the wants of SOC, DevSecOps and large-scale safety groups. Retrofitting an current, generic AI mannequin wouldn’t get them to their objective, so the Basis AI staff engineered its coaching utilizing a large-scale, expansive and well-curated cybersecurity-specific dataset.

By taking a extra precision-focused strategy to constructing the mannequin, the Basis AI staff was ready to make sure that the mannequin deeply understands real-world cyber threats, vulnerabilities and defensive methods.

Key coaching datasets included the next:

• Vulnerability Databases: Together with detailed CVEs (Widespread Vulnerabilities and Exposures) and CWEs (Widespread Weak point Enumerations) to pinpoint recognized threats and weaknesses.
• Menace Habits Mappings: Structured from confirmed safety frameworks reminiscent of MITRE ATT&CK, offering context on attacker methodologies and behaviors.
• Menace Intelligence Stories: Complete insights derived from world cybersecurity occasions and rising threats.
• Crimson-Staff Playbooks: Tactical plans outlining real-world adversarial methods and penetration methods.
• Actual-World Incident Summaries: Documented analyses of cybersecurity breaches, incidents, and their mitigation paths.
• Compliance and Safety Pointers: Established finest practices from main requirements our bodies, together with the Nationwide Institute of Requirements and Expertise (NIST) frameworks and the Open Worldwide Software Safety Undertaking (OWASP) safe coding rules.

This tailor-made coaching routine positions Basis-sec-8B uniquely to excel at complicated cybersecurity duties, providing considerably enhanced accuracy, deeper contextual understanding and faster menace response capabilities than general-purpose options.

Benchmarking Basis-sec-8B LLM

Cisco’s technical benchmarks present Basis-sec-8B delivers cybersecurity efficiency corresponding to considerably bigger fashions:

Benchmark	Basis-sec-8B	Llama-3.1-8B	Llama-3.1-70B
CTI-MCQA	67.39	64.14	68.23
CTI-RCM	75.26	66.43	72.66

By designing the inspiration mannequin to be cybersecurity-specific, Cisco is enabling SOC groups to realize higher effectivity with superior menace analytics with out having to pay excessive infrastructure prices to get it.

Cisco’s broader strategic imaginative and prescient, detailed in its weblog, Foundation AI: Robust Intelligence for Cybersecurity, addresses widespread AI integration challenges, together with restricted area alignment of general-purpose fashions, inadequate datasets and legacy system integration difficulties. Basis-sec-8B is particularly designed to navigate these limitations, working effectively on minimal {hardware} configurations, usually requiring only one or two Nvidia A100 GPUs.

Meta additionally underscored its open-source technique at RSAC 2025, increasing its AI Defenders Suite to strengthen safety throughout generative AI infrastructure. Their open-source toolkit now consists of Llama Guard 4, a multimodal classifier detecting coverage violations throughout textual content and pictures, enhancing compliance monitoring inside AI workflows.

Additionally launched is LlamaFirewall, an open-source, real-time safety framework integrating modular capabilities that features PromptGuard 2, which is used to detect immediate injections and jailbreak makes an attempt. Additionally launched as a part of LlamaFirewall are Agent Alignment Checks that monitor and shield AI agent decision-making processes together with CodeShield, which is designed to examine generated code to determine and mitigate vulnerabilities.

Meta additionally enhanced Immediate Guard 2, providing two open-source variants that additional strengthen the way forward for open-source AI-based infrastructure. They embody a high-accuracy 86M-parameter mannequin and a leaner, lower-latency 22M-parameter different optimized for minimal useful resource use.

Moreover, Meta launched the open-source benchmarking suite CyberSec Eval 4, which was developed in partnership with CrowdStrike. It options CyberSOC Eval, benchmarking AI effectiveness in lifelike Safety Operations Heart (SOC) eventualities and AutoPatchBench, which is used to guage autonomous AI capabilities for figuring out and fixing software program vulnerabilities.

Meta additionally launched the Llama Defenders Program, which supplies early entry to open-AI-based safety instruments, together with sensitive-document classifiers and audio menace detection. Personal Processing is a privacy-first, on-device AI piloted inside WhatsApp.

At RSAC 2025, ProjectDiscovery gained the award for the “Most Modern Startup” within the Innovation Sandbox, highlighting its dedication to open-source cybersecurity. Its flagship device, Nuclei, is a customizable, open-source vulnerability scanner pushed by a world neighborhood that quickly identifies vulnerabilities throughout APIs, web sites, cloud environments and networks.

Nuclei’s extensive YAML-based templating library consists of over 11,000 detection patterns, 3,000 straight tied to particular CVEs, enabling real-time menace identification. Andy Cao, COO at ProjectDiscovery, emphasised open-source’s strategic significance, stating: “Successful the twentieth annual RSAC Innovation Sandbox proves open-source fashions can achieve cybersecurity. It displays the facility of our community-driven strategy to democratizing safety.”

ProjectDiscovery’s success aligns with Gartner’s 2024 Hype Cycle for Open-Source Software, which positions open-source AI and cybersecurity instruments within the “Innovation Set off” part. Gartner recommends that organizations set up open-source program workplaces (OSPOs), undertake software program bill-of-materials (SBOM) frameworks, and guarantee regulatory compliance by way of efficient governance practices.

Actionable insights for safety leaders

Cisco’s Basis-sec-8B, Meta’s expanded AI Defenders Suite and ProjectDiscovery’s Nuclei collectively demonstrated that cybersecurity innovation thrives most when openness, collaboration and specialised area experience align throughout firm boundaries. These firms and others like them are setting the stage for any cybersecurity supplier to be an lively collaborator in creating cybersecurity defenses that ship higher efficacy at decrease prices.

As Patel emphasised throughout his keynote, “These aren’t fantasies. These are real-life examples that shall be delivered as a result of we now have bespoke safety fashions that shall be reasonably priced for everybody. Higher safety efficacy goes to come back at a fraction of the price with state-of-the-art reasoning.”