14 DAY TRIAL // Gianni Gnesa was scheduled to make a presentation at the Hack In The Box security conference on October 14 in Singapore. Not anymore.
According to a tweet he sent out three days ago, and a notice on the conference website, Mr. Gnesa was forced to cancel his talk "due to legal pressure from the manufacturers affected" by his presentation's focus.
Mr. Gnesa had prepared a talk on the vulnerabilities found in surveillance cameras that are accessible via the Internet, also known as IP cameras.
Nowadays these cameras are almost everywhere, and Mr. Gnesa's presentation detailed methods through which IP cameras from a specific manufacturer could be hacked and used to illegally spy on unsuspecting targets.
His talk was also planned to show the methods which attackers could use to stay undetected on the device, along with some recommendations on how to protect IP cameras from such intrusions.
This is not the first time something like this has happened, previously in August, FireEye also using the same method of threatening legal action against ERNW, a German security consulting company.
While FireEye's complaints were that the presentation would include technical details that would reveal some of its intellectual property, most of the InfoSec community eventually understood that the talk could not be given, and for good reasons.
Judging by Mr. Gnesa's tweet, this does not seem to be the case.
If companies would use half of the energy they use to get after researchers, to fix their products, we would all be more secure. #HITBGSEC
— Gianni Gnesa (@GianniGnesa) October 4, 2015
