Apple Misses Out On The Black Hat

The Black Hat security conference which started on Saturday at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, will no longer include a presentation by Apple’s security engineering team. The team’s presence was highly anticipated as it would have been its first ever official presentation in the conference’s history.

Apparently, there have been some problems that the team’s members could not fix in time. Apple, known for being discreet with such details, did not comment on the security issues that let to its decision.

Black Hat’s director, Mr. Jeff Moss, talked to Computerworld about the no-show, saying that the lack of information is mainly caused by Apple’s marketing division, which must approve all the public releases made by the company’s employees, in order to make sure that all the information brought to the public is filtered through Apple’s vigilant executives and will not harm its image.

"We had a lot of people from government agencies saying they'd love to know more about the security engineers at Apple, because it's such an opaque company," explained Mr. Jeff Moss. He added that such a presentation would have definitely put Apple in a positive light.

At this point Apple’s decision to skip the conference seems final. Still, Jeff Moss wanted to leave a window opened and stated that the company’s security engineering team is welcomed back in case they change their mind.

Among the sponsors of the event are many worldwide popular companies such as Google, Nokia and Microsoft.