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Black Hat is a corporate "vendor" conference. You're probably thinking of DEFCON. At DEFCON, you don't register. You pay them in cash, and they give you a (co

Black Hat is a corporate "vendor" conference. You're probably thinking of DEFCON. At DEFCON, you don't register. You pay them in cash, and they give you a (complex, hard to fake) badge. You wear the badge and they let you into the conference area. They don't want to know who you are, which nicely avoids the problems Black Hat was having.

munin 8y ago
> and they give you a (complex, hard to fake) badge Unless they run out of those, then they just give you a paper card that you wear on some string or something.
tptacek 8y ago
Black Hat is the most important industry vulnerability research conference of the year. It is also very corporate, and for the last several years it's had a large trade-show vendor "expo". It's a big-business UBM conference and certainly makes money from vendors, but don't get confused; that stuff is all bolted on to the gigantic multi-track speaker conference. There are, so far as I know, no pay-to-play Black Hat talks; all the listed briefings were picked by the review board.
- cschmidt 8y ago
  That's good to know that there isn't pay-to-play (and http://www.blackhat.com/about.html http://www.blackhat.com/about.html confirms that). I assumed anything so corporate would be.
  - tptacek 8y ago
    It would be a fair assumption for something like RSA, and the vendor side of Black Hat looks a bit like RSA.
    - billyhoffman 8y ago
      On the plus side, if you have a talk that was accepted at Black Hat, you usually can just re-submit it to RSA. It's been several years, but I remember the RSA conf held in early Spring usually had it's CFP deadline something like a 6 months before. So if you were speaking at BH, then around July/August you had everything ready to present, which was perfect timing to submit for the following year's RSA.
adiusmus 8y ago
Thanks. I figured it was like defcon. I’m now imagining a place full of sharks with smaller fish swimming around waiting for their credit cards to get caught in a net.

munin 8y ago

> and they give you a (complex, hard to fake) badge Unless they run out of those, then they just give you a paper card that you wear on some string or something.

tptacek 8y ago

Black Hat is the most important industry vulnerability research conference of the year. It is also very corporate, and for the last several years it's had a large trade-show vendor "expo". It's a big-business UBM conference and certainly makes money from vendors, but don't get confused; that stuff is all bolted on to the gigantic multi-track speaker conference. There are, so far as I know, no pay-to-play Black Hat talks; all the listed briefings were picked by the review board.

cschmidt 8y ago
That's good to know that there isn't pay-to-play (and http://www.blackhat.com/about.html http://www.blackhat.com/about.html confirms that). I assumed anything so corporate would be.
- tptacek 8y ago
  It would be a fair assumption for something like RSA, and the vendor side of Black Hat looks a bit like RSA.
  - billyhoffman 8y ago
    On the plus side, if you have a talk that was accepted at Black Hat, you usually can just re-submit it to RSA. It's been several years, but I remember the RSA conf held in early Spring usually had it's CFP deadline something like a 6 months before. So if you were speaking at BH, then around July/August you had everything ready to present, which was perfect timing to submit for the following year's RSA.

adiusmus 8y ago

Thanks. I figured it was like defcon. I’m now imagining a place full of sharks with smaller fish swimming around waiting for their credit cards to get caught in a net.