As global awareness and concern continues to grow around the subject, Black Hat Asia 2014 will feature a strong slate of privacy-related programming. Here we highlight three selected Briefings that cut right to the core of one of the most important issues of our time.
The governmental trend toward "Open Data" is alarming, not least because government entities regularly show themselves to befairly inept at the task of safeguarding data. In Disasters in the Making: How I Torture Open Government Data Systems for Fun, Profit, and Time Travel Tom Keenan will brief you on the results of his and others' recent spelunking trips into Open Government systems. After show and tell, he'll transition into policy recommendations that could make these initiatives at least a little less leaky and dysfunctional.
Privacy-by-Design (PbD) stipulates that privacy considerations should be a key component of product design, rather than a poorly implemented afterthought. Despite the idea's increasing prominence, qualified privacy consultants are thin on the ground, which is why security specialists are helping take up the slack. The security pro's transition will not be without its bumps, though, which is the topic of Richard Chow's Privacy-by-Design for the Security Practitioner. If you're a security expert looking to add a few new arrows to your quiver, this crash course in the strange new world of PbD should be your first destination.
Journalists can be a paranoid lot, and you'll learn exactly why in Tomorrow's News is Today's Intel: Journalists as Targets and Compromise Vectors. Activists, dissidents, and journalists are increasingly prone to targeted intrusion by government actors, and the extent of these compromises is only recently becoming clear. This Briefing will showcase the variety of attacks being perpetrated, and examine how attacker tradecraft varies by geographical origin. The dirty tricks in evidence seem nearly limitless.
To see the full list of Briefings scheduled for Black Hat Asia 2014, visit www.blackhat.com/asia-14/briefings.html. And if you'd like to register to attend the event, please visit Black Hat Asia 2014's registration page to get started.