US officials are thinking about restricting Chinese hackers from attending popular hacker conferences in Las Vegas. This is how they are planning to fight Chinese cyber espionage.

The US government admitted they could use visa restrictions and other measures to prevent the Chinese from attending hacking conferences in August. This move may follow the US decision to charge 5 Chinese military officers with hacking into US corporations to steal trade secrets.
Some believe that banning Chinese hackers from the conferences is counterproductive, because the authorities won’t be able to arrest them or recruit for US work.
In response, China has denied all charges, claiming the US grand jury indictment was simply “made up” and would certainly damage trust between the countries. As for the organizers of the hacking conferences, they knew nothing about this move, but believed that limiting participation from China was a really bad idea.
One of the conferences, Black Hat, lists several speakers on its website who may be Chinese nationals: for instance, an employee of the Chinese security software maker Qihoo 360 is going to present a technical talk on vulnerabilities in font scalers, and a couple of researchers from the Chinese University of Hong Kong will be talking about a new approach for cracking social networks.
The second conference doesn’t have any Chinese nationals on its speaker roster, but they have to admit that it would be tough to prevent the Chinese from attending anyway, because the privacy-conscious organizers only accept payments in cash, don’t ask for IDs, and don’t write names on badges.
The recent indictment was the first criminal hacking charge that the United States has filed against specific foreign officials. Although the indictments didn’t name the companies involved, the press believe they are State Nuclear Power Technology, Baosteel and Aluminum Corp of China.
The Def Con hacking convention, which annually draws more than 15,000 hackers, researchers, corporate security experts and others to Las Vegas, asked American officials to stay away after Snowden leaks had become public. Black Hat conference runs from 6 to 7 August, and Def Con – from 7 to 10 August.
In the meantime, it is known that about a dozen of Chinese citizens were unexpectedly denied visas a week ago to attend a space and cyber conference hosted in Colorado.