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RSA Email 2: The Anti-Feds
From: Dave Aitel <dave () immunityinc com>
Date: Wed, 29 Apr 2015 10:48:43 -0400
It's impossible to look across the Large Booth RSA Expo Floor and not see the balkanization of security with new eyes. On one side, Sophos (Spanish), on the other, Trend Micro (Japanese). In the middle Kaspersky (RU), Symantec (US), Intel (US), Qualys (US/EU), BAE (UK), Raytheon (US), Microsoft (US). I had a brief conversation with a couple Kaspersky researchers in the hallway. They were like "Yes, the next Kaspersky SAS Con is going to be held in a Banya <https://banya.kaspersky.com/>! Hahahaha!" To be honest it reminded me of that scene in The Princess Bride where the little bald dude laughs as he drinks the poison only to fall dead <https://youtu.be/U_eZmEiyTo0?t=216>a few seconds later, mid chortle. But this is at some level less about the particulars of Kaspersky's denial and more about ANY company trying to penetrate ANY foreign market in this environment. Huawei, which if it was an RPG character would have overflowed the counter for available gold pieces, had a booth where the only people talking in English were the head of their European research team (5 people strong!) and a salesguy from EdgeWave, which is now selling co-branded Huawei devices in the US market. In the meantime I hear rumors that one of the requirements for the Time Warner Cable and Comcast deal to have gone through (it did not) was the ripping out of 1.5Billion USD of Huawei equipment. "It's not protectionist behavior if someone's really after you!" you can hear them say. When I went to the Huawei booth to watch <https://twitter.com/daveaitel/status/590583359421685761>their slideshow <https://twitter.com/daveaitel/status/590584064907812864>it was just <https://twitter.com/daveaitel/status/590584855836160001>me and two probable-HUMINT guys, dutifully taking a picture of every slide for later. The NSA had their own giant booth a few doors down, where they, as they do every year, showed off an Enigma. I'm not sure if the understated message is simply "To us, all your giant flat screens showing off big-data-behavioral-analysis-endpoint-protection look a lot like this little typewritery gadget here. Clicky clicky!" It may be also, "There's no sane reason for us to have a booth nearly this expensive, but we do!" just like everyone else. It is hard to avoid the fact that the new White House cyber-related sanctions list is about to come out and seriously put the hammer to a few big companies on that expo floor and of course, every other country (*cough* China *cough*) will have to follow suit. My question to myself walking around was whether they were all smart enough to be scared. -dave
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- RSA Email 2: The Anti-Feds Dave Aitel (Apr 29)