An op-ed by two champions of women's professional tennis lays out a rationale not only for the WTA not to stage its championship in Saudi Arabia, but a perfectly cromulent reason why the #BlackHat conference should not now, or ever again - at least until its draconian social laws dramatically change - host an infosec conference in Saudi Arabia.
#Infosec already treads a fine line and many members of our professional community are women, nonbinary, LGBTQ+, or members of other groups that are threatened, or have been subject to deeply offensive and (in some cases) genocidal behavior by those in charge of that country.
Nobody should have to wonder whether being accepted to speak at a professional conference will result in their death at the hands of the state where the conference will take place, or that their civil and human rights may be strictly curtailed by the host country.
It's disgusting that an organization with as much power as #Informa PLC would even consider hosting a professional conference in the KSA, as they plan to do in November.
I appeal to members of this community who care about human rights and their fellow community members who simply cannot travel to this part of the world without the fear of imprisonment, torture, or death not to support this conference, not to submit to their call for papers, not to promote or encourage others to attend, and to speak out about the human rights this government violates - KSA behaves abhorrently every day.
Informa PLC - you must end the practice of hosting this conference in Saudi Arabia until circumstances drastically change there.
Those of you who gladly appear on the Black Hat MEA website as speakers or keynote speakers - we see you, and this tells us everything we all need to know about you and your values. You should be deeply ashamed.
Join #BlackHat Webinar "Protect Unstructured Data at Petabyte Scale with Rubrik and AWS" on January 30 to learn how you can protect file data with air-gapped, immutable backups, scan billions of files at lightning speed and more. Register here>> https://bit.ly/3SkmfSK
In a few months @OSINTgeek and I will be returning to Singapore for another training at #BlackHat Asia!
However... this time, in addition to the updates we have made, there will also be a little surprise, something we have never done before 🤭🤫 #BHASIA
PS: Is Blackhat even on Mastodon? I can only find those fowl site leech bots that repost what they post on the X-fowls site. (cue in the echo theme song). But it seems like they should have a real presence here.
I'd really like to know why some of the most important and influential #infosec conferences have decided that it's totally a-OK to host their event in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, whose leader personally ordered his security staff to detain, and torture to death a US-based reporter who exposed corruption in the kingdom.
If you feel strongly that the #infosec industry should stand by its principles, demand that Informa PLC end the practice of hosting #BlackHat in Saudi Arabia.
The sheer fact that they choose to host their event in a location that would literally murder me for existing [and I'm just a white heterocisbinary dude] disqualifies said conference from being anything but a #shitshow that'll make it trivial for the islamofacist regime to earmark anyone with any #ITsec, #InfoSec, #OpSec and #ComSec skills for #surveillance with #Govware like #Pegasus as well as #harrassment...
Oof. I've never used (nor even heard of) CloudNordic but this is ... not good.
CloudNordic has told customers to consider all of their data lost following a ransomware infection that encrypted the large Danish cloud provider's servers
Remember if you have data in the cloud then it's just on somebody else's computer, and could potentially vanish at any moment. Keep backups if anything you have is irreplaceable.
My coworker showed me his #blackhat badge and suddenly the #DEFCON31 badge isn’t so bad anymore. They spend $2,300 and get a flimsy card and I spent $460 and got a cool badge and another $60 for the embedded systems village badge to slot in. I’m making a push at work next time for an emphasis on #DEFCON and want to do the trainings next year
For those that attended Black Hat last week and made it to the vendor area, tell those of us that were not there - how many companies were selling a compliance scanner that "uses AI"? Solely based on the scam/spam email that I am getting despite not attending, I will assume a lot.
Black Hat and DefCon were amazing. the amount of thoughtful researchers, experts, hackers and gov't officials gives you hope that we're (kinda) on the right path
Let's assume 30k people attended #BlackHat and #DefCon.
If 1% of them catch #COVID, that's 300 people.
If 10% of them end up with #LongCovid, that's 30 people.
All the numbers are probably actually higher.
Is disabling 30+ people an acceptable price to pay for a bunch of security wonks to get to socialize in person for a week?
I don't think so. Do you? Explain your answer. #CovidIsNotOver
since everyone and their dad is about to come home from #blackhat and #defcon with COVID: REST. Rest way more than you think you need to, even if your infection is "mild".
Wow, who could have guessed that if you walk around a conference with lots of ex-military people during a COVID surge without keeping a good mask on you'll catch COVID and help spread it. Aren't #infosec people supposed to be good at measuring risk? #DefCon#BlackHat#CovidIsNotOver#smdh
> Dildog and Medus4 go over the how's and why's of Veilid in "The Internals of Veilid"
Veilid: an open-source, peer-to-peer, mobile-first networked application framework. Talk covers how it works as a protocol, structures, cryptography, and how to write applications.
I'm used to seeing tech-policy types from D.C. talk about security in unobjectionable generalities, so it was something else to see a #BlackHat talk yesterday in which two CISA advisors offered detailed, actionable infosec advice to tech firms like "adopt memory-safe languages" and "offer SSO at no extra cost." https://www.pcmag.com/news/at-black-hat-feds-push-tech-firms-to-adopt-radical-transparency
Managed to catch up with @joy and the @zerotier team at #Blackhat yesterday, and they gave me this absolutely adorbs 🥰 ZeroTier Tardigrade plushie!
If you’re at Blackhat, don’t miss their booth out in the startup city… both for adorbs microanimals and for learning about why I keep telling people to use #ZeroTier