Huang, who used to work as a senior consultant at the Taiwan Information Security Center and a research engineer at the Institute of Information Science at Academia Sinica, gave a version of the talk at a small conference in Taipei in 2007.
As the world’s top security conference, Black Hat would have brought the message to a far larger audience, especially as attendees would have been allowed to record it, something that was prohibited in Taiwan.
A former National Security Council official last week told the Taipei Times that Taiwan served as a “testing ground” for professional Chinese hackers, adding that only after an attack had successfully penetrated Taiwanese systems would China use the same techniques to try to infiltrate other targets.
Taiwan has developed a unique expertise in protecting against and identifying Chinese cyber attacks, skills that have been recognized by several countries, the official said.
The official said Taiwanese intelligence had established that China had about 300,000 professional hackers employed by the government, focusing on an estimated 10,000 “priority” targets in Taiwan, which include both government agencies and the private sector.
Commenting on Huang’s talk in 2007, White Hat Security chief technology officer Jeremiah Grossman said Taiwan’s cyber crime environment was “way more serious than anything I’ve ever been exposed to in the US or elsewhere,” IDG wrote.
RSS