Black Hat Talk on Chinese Cyber Crime Pulled

A presentation on a decade of Chinese state-sponsored hacking, given by an expert from Taiwan,  has been pulled from the Black Hat security conference for political reasons.

The talk, entitled “The Chinese Cyber Army: An Archaeological Study from 2001 to 2010,” was to be given by Wayne Huang, CTO of Taiwanese web application security firm Armorize Technologies. Advertised by Black Hat as “a study of Cyber Army based on incidences, forensics, and investigation data since 2001,” Huang was planning to reconstruct “the face of Cyber Army (CA)” and its techniques.

Taiwanese Government pulls the talk

The talk would have been a big draw, as Chinese hacking has been in the media eye since an attack on Google’s Chinese operation which Google claimed was driven by the Chinese government – a claim the Chinese government denied.

However with the conference less than two weeks away, officials with the Taiwanese government felt the presentation was no longer appropriate due to the sensitive nature of its content and Taiwan’s improved relations with China, explained Armorize CEO Caleb Sima.

“Basically [it was cancelled] because the material that Wayne is presenting is deemed a little too sensitive for Taiwan,” Sima said. “Wayne has explained that it really has a lot to do with the relations, the politics. The fact is the relationship between China and Taiwan has gotten to be much better, and they don’t want information like this to be presented in such a public forum.”

Armorize is based mainly in Taiwan, with offices in California, and works closely with the Taiwanese government on cyber-security issues, he added. Rather than the talk on China’s cyber-attack activities, Armorize will do a different presentation about an open source attack tool.

Black Hat briefings will be held July 28 and 29 in Las Vegas.