New Delhi, April 30 -- IT TAKES ONLY a brief chat with the organisers of Black Hat Asia to realise this is no ordinary conference. Whereas most professional get-togethers invite their guests to piggyback on the hotel Wi-Fi, Black Hat builds the network for its annual conferences in Las Vegas, London and Singapore from scratch, installing switches, access points, firewalls and monitoring sensors before the conference opens. The Network Operations Centre (NOC) must then defend it in real time from thousands of the world's best hackers-not just the conference's adversaries, but also those attending, who are explicitly tasked with attacking its infrastructure.

This year's Singapore edition, held from April 21st to 24th, took place in the sha...