Noted speaker, Mikko Hypponen, cancels RSA talk in protest to NSA collaboration allegations
In a letter to Joseph Tucci, and Art Coviello, F-Secure's Mikko Hypponen says he is canceling his talk at the 2014 RSA Conference, due to the company's deal with the NSA.
Mikko Hypponen, a widely known security expert and speaker, has given many presentations at the RSA Conference over the years. However, his talk scheduled for the 2014 RSA Conference in February, "Governments as Malware Authors" isn't going to happen.
"On December 20th, Reuters broke a story alleging that your company accepted a random number generator from the National Security Agency, and set it as the default option in one of the your products, in exchange of $10 million. Your company has issued a statement on the topic, but you have not denied this particular claim," Hypponen wrote in an open letter.
"Eventually, NSA’s random number generator was found to be flawed on purpose, in effect creating a back door. You had kept on using the generator for years despite widespread speculation that NSA had backdoored it. As my reaction to this, I’m cancelling my talk at the RSA Conference USA 2014 in San Francisco in February 2014."
