Few months ago, Dhillon(HITB Founder) told us about Govware which is organized by Ministry Of Home Affairs Singapore and they invited us to their conference.
So
HITB is invited to Singapore
Govware, and we were quite looking forward to this event as we are told Singapore is first world country and they are
great in event organizing. Unfortunately this time, we are going down to Singapore with our own budget(Other events' organizers pay our accomodation for our effort) but we thought since it's just our neighbor country, lets pay on our own.
So we are being supportive to run Web Hacking Challenge for Govware as well(Rufio handles this), me and Mel are also invited to give talk in closed door - Law Enforcement Track to share our knowledge with the audience. In the first day of event, everything goes smoothly. Me and mel are presenting 8 Layers Of Security and performing Network Forensics using HeX 2.0 that we have just released few days ago. We are glad to know some of people who are working in law enforcement units.
So I don't want to comment much about other presentations since I don't really listen to them as we are not allowed to, but we still managed to listen to 3 talks which are also closed door since their people never block us. But then again, we were banned from the room after their clueless dudes figure out we were in the talk, they should have blocked us from going in instead of asking us out in the middle of the presentation.
So nothing much happening in the first day of event except this shit, we went back to apartment and grabbed our dinner.
So today(second day of Govware) we went to the venue, and we just started running Web Hacking Challenge, as usual all of us are wearing HITB t-shirt to present who we are. Then out of sudden, there's some "don't know who"(probably fear to lose(kiasu) organizer) came to us, and informed us that we are not allowed to deliver our HITB conference fliers, we can't promote our HITB Conference in overt style(I don't get this, we just deliver our flier for whoever passes by our booth like everybody else instead of doing it aggresively) and we are also prohibited to wear our own HITB t-shirt as well(but we see others can wear their own company t-shirt(hint: Splunk) and they are not abused.
So what should we do now after coming down all the way from Kuala Lumpur to this Govware Singapore? Absolutely nothing but get out of this crap place. And Govware is promoting Positive Security but can't even allow us to inform the audience about another security conference with world class security experts in neighbor country(to be honest our conference are totally different than Govware as we are emphasizing more on new attack mechanisms and more technical oriented).
So to conclude this, we are now enlightened of how thisso called "First World Country" Ministry people manages international event, with unfair treatment where other companies can do their "not so overt" marketing(because they are sponsors?), they can wear their own company t-shirt, but we are asked to fuck off!
So this is definitely great job from them, and thanks for the awful invitation, you can fuck off now. Kudos!
So Enjoyable ;]