Apple To Present At This Week’s Black Hat Conference In Las Vegas

For the first time in 15 years, Apple has agreed to present at this week’s Black Hat conference in Las Vegas regarding key security technologies within iOS, Bloomberg reportsTrey Ford, Black Hat’s general manager, said it’s significant that an Apple representative will be taking the stage at Black Hat because in recent years, Apple products have been “stripped of their image of being hack-proof”. Apple seems to be finally acknowledging that it needs a stronger relationship with the hacking community as its products grow in popularity, notes the source.

“Bottom line — no one at Apple speaks without marketing approval,” Ford wrote in an e-mail. “Apple will be at Black Hat 2012, and marketing is on board.”

Quoting from the source:

“The company’s rise has made it a bigger target, as hackers have been discovering bugs in the iPhone since it came out in 2007. Earlier this year, more than600,000 Macs were infected, the first major malicious software attack targeting Apple computers.

Although PCs running Microsoft’s Windows and smartphones using Google’s Android software are targeted more often, the stepped-up attacks against products by Apple have become noteworthy, given the company’s exalted reputation for security.

Apple’s security researchers have lurked the halls at Black Hat and other conferences. But the closest anyone has come to seeing someone from Apple speak on stage was 2008. That’s when a panel of Apple insiders was scheduled to give a talk about the company’s security-response team. The highly anticipated event was abruptly canceled when Apple’s marketing department caught wind of it, according to Ford.”

The first time Microsoft security researchers spoke at the conference was in 1998, and the first time Google took the stage was in 2010.

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