Talk on Chinese Cyber Army Pulled From Black Hat

Dennis Fisher writes on ThreatPost:

A talk on China's state-sponsored offensive security efforts scheduled for the Black Hat conference later this month has been pulled from the conference after concerns were raised by some people within the Chinese and Taiwanese government about the talk's content.

The presentation was to be delivered by Wayne Huang, CTO of Armorize, an application security company with R&D operations in Taiwan. The talk was billed as an in-depth, historical look at the offensive capabilities and operations of China's so-called cyber-army. The description of the presentation on the Black Hat site promises an interesting presentation.

"Operation Aurora, GhostNet, Titan Rain. Reactions were totally different in the US and in Asia. While the US media gave huge attention, Asia find it unbelievable and interesting, that cyber warfare and government-backed commercial espionage efforts that have been well established and conduced since 2002, and have almost become a part of people's lives in Asia, caused so much "surprise" in the US. Here we'll call this organization as how they've been properly known for the past eight years as the "Cyber Army," or "Wang Jun" in Mandarin. This is a study of Cyber Army based on incidences, forensics, and investigation data since 2001. Using facts, we will reconstruct the face of Cyber Army (CA), including who they are, where they are, who they target, what they want, what they do, their funding, objectives, organization, processes, active hours, tools, and techniques."

Caleb Sima, Armorize's CTO and co-founder, said on his Twitter feed yesterday that the talk had been pulled. "I had to pull our blackhat talk. Taiwanese gov is prohibiting it due to sensitive materials. Unreal."

More here.