Black Hat speaker denied entry to US in another needless hit to security research

L33tdawg: Watch his talk on Hacking Customer Information Control System from #HITB2017AMS

It's the nightmare situation nobody wants to be in.

"C'est juste un peu frustrant," said Ayoub Elaassal in a tweet last week, describing his frustration. He just found out that he had been denied entry to the US, just days before he was set to fly out from where he lives in Paris to speak at the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas.

A few days earlier, Elaassal, a Moroccan native who has dual citizenship with France, traveled to the US Embassy in Paris with a wealth of documentation to apply for a 10-year visa, but he was denied. "The guy who was questioning me said that the visa was refused," he told ZDNet on the phone last week. According to Elaassal, the consular official told him that it's likely because he holds a Moroccan passport. "He said that you are Moroccan and you work in security in France, and that triggered the alarm system," Elaassal said. He was told that he could file an appeal through an administrative process, which would send his file to Washington DC, a process that would've taken months.