Black Hat held its first infosec event in Singapore back in 2000, and we have watched the community grow massively in this region. We are thrilled to continue our Black Hat Asia show in 2015 from March 24-27 at the Marina Bay Sands, bringing with us some of the world's brightest information security professionals and researchers to share broadly-impacting vulnerabilities and the latest industry advancements with our community.
It has been brought to Black Hat's attention that unfortunately, our dates for Black Hat Asia 2015 in Singapore overlap with the local SyScan information security event also in Singapore. This is the second year of some date proximity between the two events - something we've been trying to avoid after the re-establishment of the BH Asia show in 2014. We make every effort to work with the community to avoid date collisions (as we do with other industry events) because frankly, event overlaps aren't helpful for everyone.
To clear up any confusion about our intentions, we made it a point to meet with SyScan's organizer in-person in Singapore in March 2014 after the proximity of the shows that year. We made him aware of our precise Black Hat Asia dates for 2015 - which were already confirmed at that time. We were not told of any date overlap during this meeting, and the impression was given that the shows would end up being a few weeks apart - so we started publicizing our Black Hat Asia 2015 dates in our email signatures in March 2014.
We then updated elements of the Black Hat website in early May 2014 to list our dates more formally and continued with our planning. Unfortunately, SyScan has now announced near-identical 2015 dates, despite our earlier conversations. Since then, Black Hat organizers have reached out to SyScan on multiple occasions (documented both by phone and email) to figure out what happened and rectify this situation, to no avail.
We very much regret the clash, and wish SyScan nothing but the best in 2015 - in fact, we hope that some infosec professionals will consider attending both events if they're in town. We will work with SyScan and other community events to avoid further direct clashes in the future, whenever we are able.