Thursday, August 15, 2024

The buzz from Black Hat this year

Every year in the heat of the Las Vegas desert is the Black Hat Briefings, the premier computer security conference.  There's always interesting news from the briefings (and from the much less buttoned down conference, DEFCON, which runs immediately afterwards).

So what's the buzz from Black Hat this year?  It seems that Palo Alto Networks had Booth Bunnies at their display booth:

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Now I did my share of manning the booths (yes, I was a Booth Bunny, thank you for asking) back in the '90s and the '00s.  But even in the '90s we were considerably more buttoned down than this, and for good marketing reasons.  Sure, some of the attendees might like the scenery, but some will not - and some of them will very much not like the scenery.  This has been known to be bad conference marketing juju for literally decades.

Of course, the Palo Alto Networks' Chief Marketing Officer had to go full frontal groveling* in his apology:

PAN's chief marketing officer Unnikrishnan KP, or Unni as he's often called, issued his apology earlier this week calling it "tone deaf."

"Last week at Black Hat in Las Vegas, an unfortunate decision was made at a Palo Alto Networks event to have hostesses wear branded lampshades on their heads," he said. "It was tone-deaf, in poor taste, and not aligned with our company values or brand campaign. 

"I take full responsibility for this misjudgment and have addressed it with my team and am taking steps to prevent such misguided actions in the future.

"Please accept my heartfelt apologies for this regrettable incident."

Nikesh Arora, PAN's chairman and CEO, doubled down on the apologies on Tuesday, echoing the points made by Unni, adding that what happened was "unacceptable."

I expect the headcount at Palo Alto Networks' marketing department has gotten a spin.  We apologize again for the fault in the subtitles. Those responsible for sacking the people who have just been sacked have been sacked.

* See what I did there?  I crack myself up.


10 comments:

  1. Eh, OK. So I'm a Neanderthal. :-)

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  2. *yawn* Some people have too much time on their hands.
    I've gone to exactly *zero* conferences of any kind. Not my thing.

    Had I been there, I would have taken one look at women wearing lampshades and thought "Palo Alto is retarded" and moved on with my life. I wouldn't have bothered to take a picture, or to go on some dumb social media campaign to call them out. I wouldn't have expected an apology or statements about "tone deafness".

    I get it...to a non-zero demographic "sex sells", and I guess to some non-zero sub-demographic I guess women wearing lampshades would activate the part of the brain that equates buying a product with "maybe one or more of these women will pay attention to me". But most IT guys who actually have the intelligence to do the job well 1) wouldn't have that thought and 2) wouldn't choose Palo Alto as a product even if hoards of women throwing themselves at you were included in the deal.

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  3. Well if I were a marketing guy… my advice as a departing employee would be to tell the manageMINT to go woke in their marketing next time, HAR HAR HAR! 😂👍

    That is not an offensive display, and the lard assed green hairs, the angry lesbians and the People Of Pronouns can go eff themselves. If they were nudies showing splayed clam - then THAT might be offensive and they’d actually have something to bitch about…

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  4. Pics of the fired employees, or it never happened.

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  5. "I take full responsibility for this misjudgment and have addressed it with my team..." I say I take responsibility, but I am not going anywhere, and I yelled at my team for an hour. Problem solved to my satisfaction. Also, this is the biggest problem in computer security?

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  6. I wonder how many attendees had their photo taken with the hostesses? Why would you feel the need to apologize for this?

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  7. I wouldn't be offended by the display. Hotties with lampshades on their heads - big deal. I might take a photo or two just because...

    The company should never apologize for this one. If the special little Pronoun People are offended, go somewhere else. Likewise the rug munchers and door knob suckers can go piss up a rope. Now, if they had strippers... nah, too much to hope for.

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  8. Everything would be fine if they had chosen the RIGHT models.
    Some of those gender-neutral cows!

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  9. Borepatch what's your take on the recent massive social security hack?

    Market ticker has a current post on it.

    What can you and I do to reduce the harm from these ongoing hacks?

    ReplyDelete

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