Wednesday, October 08, 2008

Govware: Positive Security?

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 ;]

12 comments:

codefreak said...

Come on, they are just showing their "love" to Malaysian. :p

Anonymous said...

Fren, if I were you I conveniently go back to hotel and go shopping in Orchard Road. No point being treated like shit. Since they are the host you are the guest. They should at least be professional.

Anonymous said...

Nothing to be proud with them.. We are better than them...he3

Beng Hacks said...

Shit man, sorry that happened!

I went to your booth on the 1st day, passed ur web challenge and this guy (think indian?) with specs congrats me and told me got chance to win trip to KL for the HiTB this month.

So how? Game over?

Anonymous said...

Hey Dude, sorry that it was a terrible shitty experience. Anyway, I don't have high hopes of these chaps from MHA and GovWare folks. What they normally do is go to BlackHat/Defcon, copy the materials from there, and come back and re-hash that in "closed doors" (why?? so that nobody outside the door knows that they hashed it from BH/DC...and hence the robotic presentations :)))). Well they'll argue to you that it's brand new "research material" man...!

Relax lah dude. At least you can rest easy to know that HITB is still one of Asia's great conference.

Malaysia Boleh! Singapore Eh Sai!

Anonymous said...

Hi CS, I was at your booth on the first day and saw nothing wrong with the HITB folks handing out pamphlets and wearing HITB T-shirts. I thought GovWare was fucked up too, the speeches were superficial at best and obviously vendor-specific. Thumbs down for the organizers of this time-wasting event.

Anonymous said...

What is Govware???

Anonymous said...

hi geek00l,

This is what Malaysian said "HuJan Emas Di Negeri Orang, Hujan Batu Di Negeri Sendiri, Lebih Baik Di Negeri Sendiri"..just my 2 cent.. :-)

eno314 said...

Gosh!!! I can't wait to go HiTB!! CTF, the new Wireless Village, OPEN HACk!!! and the tracks!!! I have once talked to Dino from TelSpace, miss his talk of wifi hacks. I wish i can attend a few crazily cool tracks & workshop coming end of this month. (NGRS by AR Securebits, Web 2.0 Network Ownage by Sensepost, Moocherhunting by ThinkSecure, great speakers like Jeremiah from WhiteHat, Marcus from Tenable Network and MANY MORE ...and of course spoonfork & geek00|'s NSM training!!!)

HiTB ROcks!!!

Anonymous said...

Don't wanna invite GovWare people to HiTB? We can teach them on how to treat their neighbors well.

Anonymous said...

to hell with singaporeans.. their country have nothing except bunch of US cock sucker..

Anonymous said...

With all due respect to you and your great work with hex and what not, I'd like to rant a bit. I know its belated, but here goes :)

Sometimes security is not about you 'teaching' people what to do with your l337 NSM toolkit. It is normal for security conferences/events to be a closed door affair or by invitation only. I bet there were some concerns by some parties that you're blackhats/can't_be_trusted/not-really-security-analyst whom they can share information with. So its better late than never to kick you out. The level or kind of stuff you and other l337 friends write at security.org.my also don't help I think.

So get real, be trusted, and stop associating yourself with ppl whose deep insights on security are only by taking screenshots at defacements or error messages, blowing them out of porportion, make kidd1e5 happy and then sell a training program! So don't be disheartened at being kicked out at a per invite only program.