Security Researcher Attacked While At Conference

New submitter fineous fingers writes "U.S. computer security researcher Georgia Weidman has revealed on her blog that a fellow speaker at the Confidence security conference in Krakow, Poland attempted to rape her. The attack occurred in her hotel room in the early morning hours of 28 May. Luckily, Georgia was able to fend her attacker off by clocking him in the head with a coffee mug. I was personally at this conference, but was staying at a different hotel and found out about it after the fact. It was Georgia herself that told me after she gave her fantastic talk on Leveraging Mobile Devices on Pentests. That she was able to give a flawless presentation later that day and had the courage to talk about the attack on her blog shows how awesome she really is."

Comments

Re:Innocent until blogged about

[fineous fingers]

He denies it. She presented no evidence. He presented none either, even though he is under no obligation to. No charges files. Her word against his.

Of course he denies it what is he going to say? "Yes I am a sexual predator"? There was plenty of evidence that something went down. There were bruises on both of their faces. Many of her items (that Gont took) were found in his room even after he denied having them. Polish Law Enforcement WAS contacted but decided not to take any action.

Re: it would be easy to gather the evidence

[fineous fingers]

She did go to the police. Neither person involved was Polish so they were not interested. Fingers

Re:Innocent until blogged about

[fineous fingers]

I put that link in the summary. They took it out. Fingers

Re:Innocent until blogged about

[Idarubicin]

I find every time they go running to the Internet instead of the cops to be suspect frankly, as I can accuse anybody of anything and so can you. .... if he did what she said she should have been on the phone to the cops not 10 minutes later, why wasn't she?

I don't know if you're illiterate, lazy, or just an ass -- but had you read the linked post, you would know that the very first thing she tried to do was contact the police, and she stuck at it for hours until she was able to get them to show up. Turns out, this can be difficult to accomplish late at night, in a foreign country where you don't speak the language, in a former Eastern Bloc country.

She was unable to get an outside line from her hotel room phone. The hotel desk clerk claimed not to understand English well enough to place the call when asked. Her own cell phone had been damaged in the attack; she eventually was able to have a friend contact the U.S. embassy, who were able to - finally - reach the Polish police.

Some of her words and his

[Geof]

From her blog (her post is long and detailed):

I don’t want to write this. I don’t want to get caught up in anything to do with this women in infosec bit. Everyone who does get lambasted so badly at this point I’d rather avoid it entirely. You can’t say anything about sexism without getting lumped in with the creeper cards or the talk canceling at Bsides SF. . . . I’m bogged down in book edits. I’m teaching a lot of new classes this summer and fall. Needless to say, I don’t have time to process this much less write about it. Plus I’ve gotten enough pushback already. People I thought were my friends and colleagues have said things to me about this that have cut deeper than the actual assault ever could. I don’t want to deal with more of that. I don’t want to see the comments for this post. But I feel like I have to do this. I weighed my options. If I shut up and do nothing and later hear he did this to someone else, I will feel personally responsible. I have to do everything I can to make sure another speaker or attendee doesn’t get worse than I got.

This wasn’t like any of those grey areas that make anybody question the validity of any rape claim. . . . . We talk for a little bit about nothing consequential. Guy jumps on me and pins me down. . . . Perhaps I was not making myself clear, “No!” “Stop!” “I don’t want to do this!” . . . Once he had my pants down and his pants down and was completely ignoring my shouting for him to stop, it suddenly became clear to me what was about to go down. He was holding my arms down of course, so I leaned up and bit him on the arm as hard as I could, at which point he started swearing and punched me in the face. . . . I managed to lunge up towards the table and grab hold of a coffee cup. I knew I only had one shot. So I hit him with everything I had, and I got him right in the temple. And guess what, he let me go.

This is the last thing I have to say about all this. My duty is done. I don’t want to be the poster girl for infosec feminism. I want to be a researcher, and a trainer, and a speaker, and an icon.

From his blog (he wrote very little):

It was brought to my attention a recent flood of Twitter messages containing a number of accusations (ranging from "horrible", to "very horrible") against my person. The accusations were originated by someone who happened to be a speaker at the same Conference . . . and, for reasons that I didn't and don't understand, has been repeating blatant lies, every time magnifying it a bit more -- which nobody in their right mind could believe. . . . think about events that happened in the last decade based on "assumptions", or the kind of anti-humanitarian scenarios this world has experienced simply because some mentally-disordered person came up with a blatant lie that everyone followed with questioning. I will personally not contribute to the existing drama, since it someone else's game to get attention at any price.

What disturbs me here is the knee-jerk suggestion that she invented the story for some unspecified reason. Statistically, only a very small number of rape accusations turn out to be fabricated. Of course I don't know for sure what happened. I've never even heard of these people before. But based on the little evidence I have seen, I know who I believe.

Re:Innocent until blogged about

[AK Marc]

She contacted the police immediately. The police indicated a lack of will to pursue the matter. She then moved on to the conference organizers and her blog.