http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-06-05/infiltrate-conference-draws-hackers-spies-to-miami-beach
By Michael Riley
Business Week
June 05, 2014
Thomas Lim, the founder of a boutique company that sells cybermunitions
and hacking tools to governments and corporations around the world, has
mischievous taste in T-shirts. The one he’s got on, as he sits in the Art
Deco-style bar of Miami Beach’s famed Fontainebleau Hotel, says he’s a
reservist for Unit 61398 of the People’s Liberation Army, a notorious
group of Chinese computer spies. It’s an inside joke aimed at the
160 hackers, spooks, and mercenaries attending Infiltrate, an annual
security conference that draws a more elite crowd than the larger industry
confabs.
An unusually boisterous 44-year-old in a business that prizes discretion,
Lim is the chief executive officer of Coseinc, based in Singapore. His
nation-state clients are mostly countries that want to join the U.S. and
China in the cyberpower club but don’t have the skills to do it on their
own. He conducts a lot of business at conferences—networking, picking up
clients—and Infiltrate is one of his favorites. While most such gatherings
have become unabashedly commercial affairs, Infiltrate still maintains the
feel of a digital Casablanca, where hackers mingle with spies, and
defense contractors troll the bars for talent. Mindful of laws on
corporate espionage, sellers of cybermunitions are careful to say they
only provide information and code; the buyers decide what to do with it.
Over two days in May, Lim trades Edward Snowden jokes with National
Security Agency spies and slams beers with Argentinian exploit developers.
(Exploits allow a hacker to take over an unsuspecting user’s PC.) The
event’s technical talks—and sideshows such as Brazilian jujitsu
demonstrations—draw experts from England, Finland, France, Italy, and
Malaysia. There are no name badges, only color-coded wristbands: black for
featured speakers, red for the audience. The list of attendees is secret.
If you don’t already know who you’re talking to, the ground rules suggest,
you shouldn’t be asking.
[...]
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