Black Hat 2020 and DEF CON 28 Conference announce the cancellation of offline meetings

As the coronavirus epidemic continues to wreak havoc, the annual security event, Black Hat USA Conference Organizing Committee announced today that it will cancel its face-to-face offline meeting in 2020 and switch to an online virtual meeting. The organizing committee will provide a digital platform for speakers, trainers, and sponsors.

Black Hat stated in an announcement that: “We have been continuously reviewing the best ways to serve the information security community over the past few months as the global health situation continues to develop. While we will not be meeting in person, we are moving forward with a plan to transform Black Hat USA into an all-virtual event in order to best serve our community.”

The DEF CON conference also announced the cancellation of the offline meeting on the official website. The DEF CON 28 organizing committee pointed out that even if the coronavirus vaccine is invented tomorrow, vaccine testing, manufacturing, distribution, and management cannot be completed before the original date of the August conference. Therefore, the cancellation of DEF CON 28 has been unavoidable. “Even though our in-person Las Vegas event is canceled, we will run DEF CON 28 Safe Mode August 7-9 (Friday through Sunday) with 101 orientation Thursday – all of it remote. We will use the DEF CON Forums to coordinate all the various ways you to participate. That is where everyone can announce their plans, do signups, post pictures and videos and get people involved,” DEF CON also announced.

The DEF CON organizing committee said that although the Las Vegas live event has been canceled, the organizer will run the DEF CON 28 “Safe Mode with Networking” from August 7 to 9. Conference coordination and participation organization will be conducted through the DEF CON forum. On August 6th, DEF CON will open the discord.io/dc server for everyone to join and start joining the event.