RSA 2015 Expo: Best in Show

Thousands of information security professionals of all kinds streamed in and out of RSA 2015 at San Francisco's Moscone Center on the first day of RSA's sprawling expo.

The booth for RSA's Incident Response Assistance products and immediate assistance resource page (incidentresponse.rsa.com), complete with Oculus Rift VR experience.

This year, RSA exhibitors became more outrageous than ever, and did the most with some of the worst of the floor's real estate -- like Fortinet, who pulled a semi truck into what's typically seen as a "no man's land" in Moscone North.

This year, RSA introduced a dress code, which was seen by some as controversial -- but it essentially banned scantily-clad "booth babes".

The stereotypes of hackers as shadowy criminals in ghetto hoodies was widely perpetuated by many exhibitors, despite the fact that RSA's primarily white-collar attendees are actually hackers themselves.

Veracode's booth was the most colorful, with stylish art from top to bottom, and a photo booth with props that drew many.

Tripwire made great use of their sprawling exhibitor space, which features speakers, t-shirts, beer, and seating.

Tripwire's RSA 2015 exhibitor experience also features free t-shirts with bold comic-style superheroes, putting an interesting spin on the visualization of security issues.

Contentious company Huawei's giant booth seemed to have both a strong Chinese feel and a strange sense of identity crisis with its faux-brick artifice.

Exceeding Veracode's graphic style and overall excellence is AlienVault, with its Star Wars themed bar and impossible-to-miss flying saucer over the booth's two-story cityscape facade.

Strange, unsettling and irresistible to some attendees is BeyondTrust's "Whac-A-Hack" arcade game, turning Guy Fawkes masks and the face of Edward Snowden into a game of physically bashing down threats.

BeyondTrust's "Whac-A-Hack" game at the RSA 2015 expo was probably the last place Edward Snowden probably ever imagined to see his face.

The best prank badge on the show floor is without a doubt the one belonging to this esteemed company.

Pwnie Express debuted its new tool for detecting rogue network cell activity, including the ability to discover Stingrays -- the Pwn Pulse (being run on the expo floor with the above modified Pwn Pro).

On display in the Pwnie Express booth is a HackRF, a software defined radio peripheral capable of transmission or reception of radio signals from 10 MHz to 6 GHz.

This year there was more art than ever on the show floor, with plenty of terrific graphic representations of hacking and security.

At NSA's RSA 2015 booth there are piles of interesting schwag, with this year's two overarching themes being cryptography and OPSEC (operational security).

Several of the NSA's free schwag items were attuned for teaching kids cryptography, including this wheel from the National Cryptologic Museum.

A rare side view of an Enigma machine (at the NSA booth), used by British codebreakers to decipher German signals during World War II.

At Bit9 + Carbon Black's RSA 2015 booth, there's a human "army man" statue painted green to emulate the company's tagline, "Arm Your Endpoints."

As it is every year, the U.S. government is well represented at RSA 2015, with the DHS having a decidedly sales-y pitch for all who roamed near.

Our favorite giveaway this year at RSA 2015 -- so far -- are the "Malwares Wanted 2015" playing cards (by Anity Labs and VirusView), which may have a slight language barrier issue, but are still awesome.

Free robots! eSentire's RSA 2015 booth is giving away their robot army one dancing wind-up toy at a time.

To say that this year's collection of RSA 2015 exhibitors and attendees is eclectic would be an understatement -- such as this scene, captured a stone's throw from booths belonging to bootstrapping hackers, NSA, infosec megacorporations, and everyone in between.