Two more talks pulled from Black Hat hacking conference

By Jim Finkle

BOSTON, Aug 4 (Reuters) - Security researchers have pulledtwo scheduled talks in this week's Black Hat internet-securityconference in Las Vegas - one on breaking into home-alarmsystems and the other on a sophisticated Russian espionagecampaign known as "Snake."

The withdrawals follow the cancellation late last month of ahighly anticipated talk on how to identify users of the Internetprivacy service Tor.

Cancellations are not unusual ahead of hacking conferencessuch as Black Hat, which runs Wednesday and Thursday and luresinternational participants, though it is rare for so many to bepulled in advance.

"It sort of comes with the territory when you have thelatest and sometimes controversial research scheduled to bepresented on stage," said conference spokeswoman MeredithCorley. She didn't know if three cancellations was a record.

Black Hat said Logan Lamb, an employee with OakridgeNational Laboratory, had pulled a talk dubbed: "Home insecurity:no alarms, false alarms and sigint."

Its abstract, which was pulled from the website, had said hewas going to discuss "a generalized approach" for compromisingsystems from three home-security vendors: ADT Corp,Honeywell International Inc and Vivint.

Lamb could not immediately be reached for comment.

BAE Systems PLC researcher Sergei Shevchenko wasslated to deliver a talk on "Dissecting Snake" on Wednesday.

BAE spokeswoman Natasha Davies said her company had pulledthe talk.

"We are not now speaking on this at Black Hat as we are inthe midst of writing a new report on Snake that we anticipatewill be published in September," she said via email.

An abstract of the talk, that has been removed from BlackHat's website, said Shevchenko would demonstrates "severalimportant aspects of Snake functionality." (Editing by Bernadette Baum)

-1x Boeing