This one time at ShmooCamp … I had an urge to start a blog. Well long story short … I came home after a late night at ShmooCon, setup a blog and posted the following article.

Welcome to the NovaInfosecPortal – Security News, Events, and Resources for Infosec Professionals in NoVA

We’ve been planning to start a site dedicated to information security for a long time but just never got around to doing it. Tonight, however, after the excitement of Saturday at ShmooCon in Washington, DC, we finally decided on a good niche – centralizing security news, events, and resources for infosec professionals in Northern Virginia (NoVA) – and took the first step into making this idea a reality. Enjoy!

Ok … maybe the title was a little too long but with those 66 words I started this site. I actually did end up returning to ShmooCon the following morning but since I had been up until 5:00 AM or so, I obviously missed the first few talks.

Thanks to the WayBack Machine I can even get a snap-shot of what this post actually looked like as you can see above. The first actual snap-shot didn’t show up in the WayBack Machine until the following month on March 26th.

(click to enlarge)

You’ll see some favorites there … mentions of ShmooCon as well as the OWASP DC and CapSecDC meetups. The Sections area on the right still pretty much maps to our current menu. If you would like to navigate the old site, check it out on the WayBack Machine.

History

Over the years we’ve added numerous updates with the goal of helping bring together the growing infosec community. First there were several design updates … thank goodness. Of course being a blog we’ve always had an RSS feed … not sure if anyone uses that or not. At some point Twitter started playing a big role so we created the @novainfosec account. This also started the NovaBloggers feature, where we let the community know of some of our local bloggers.

One of the original features we added was our popular calendar. We started on Google and used it through this January. But we wanted more flexibility and so it was time to roll our own. Two of the improvements included a more customizable iCal feed that you can subscribe to and event comments. We are hoping the comments feature helps form more community interactions in that people can summarize what they thought of the event afterwards.

And of course a huge portion of our content are blog posts. You may remember “paques” from a few years back. She was influential in trying to turn many of my original ideas into reality. We currently have @nathiet‘s standard “Where You Want to Be this Week” (WYWTBTW) and “Top 3 NoVA Infosec Blog Posts of the Week” posts. There were my Grecs’ Infosec Ramblings post, which have since morphed into the Weekly Rewind. Periodically I’ve been known to put out news commentary or some simple how-to’s. Also @judykavuo just started posting commentary on news as well as managing job posts.

We’ve had several external contributors over the years as well. There are too many to mention here but you know who you are. And with permission, we’ve cross-posted numerous articles from some of the local websites. Many of these same individuals not only offered their words but also helped get the word out about the site. On a similar note we also started a localized version of Andrew Hay’s Security D-List Interviews. So far we’ve had two posts but if you’d like to nominate someone let us know. And overall we are always looking for more blog contributors. So if you are interested in putting out a weekly or monthly “column” … or even just a one-off rant … contact us!

Recent Updates & the Future

More recently we’ve been trying to push our content out more to make it accessible elsewhere. We finally updated our FaceBook page to be more than just a placeholder. The Wall includes all our blog posts and tweets and the Calendar pulls in our iCal events feed. Our event listing was also incorporated on DcTechEvents.com. This is another site to not only find our events but also other tech activities around town.

Going forward we have even bigger plans. I’ve thought of many ideas including more community-based offerings such as a mailing list (another one?), a meetup, a forum, an IRC channel, a wiki, etc. Others included a weekly or monthly newsletter or some member-only services (e.g., consolidated list of local CFPs). That’s nice but what really matters is what YOU want. If any of the ideas above look good or if you have other suggestions you’d like to see, please let us know.

We have a small budget and a platform so by letting us know what you want, we can better spend it to help improve the community. And of course we’re always looking for more funding sources (besides my rapidly depleting bank account) so we can offer even more. One way you can help here is to download our Media Kit and pass it along to your company’s marketing/advertising people.

How You Can Help

Lots of people have asked over the years how they could help. Well … all that we ask is that if you find this site useful, review the following suggestions and do as many as you feel are appropriate.

• Subscribe to our RSS or iCal feeds.
• Add summary comments to events you attended.
• Follow @novainfosec.
• Write a blog post if you have an idea that you want to get more exposure.
• Friend/Like our Facebook page and subscribe to that page’s calendar.
• Nominate people for the NovaInfosec D-List.
• Ask to join the NovaInfosec Twits.
• Tell us what else YOU want!
• Download and email our Media Kit onto any contacts you have in your company’s marketing/ad department.
• Contribute a one-time donation or subscribe to be a $2/mo or $20/yr contributor.

To close this post out I wanted to again thank you … the local community … for continuing to support our site through the years. Every once in a while someone will approach me at an event and compliment the site. It’s little things like that that keep me going … that inspire me to continue on through the next 1000 posts.

For those that haven’t heard I’m honored to have been chosen to speak at this year’s BSidesLV again. I’m continuing on with my whole “career” theme. Last year I discussed how to get into security and create a strong foundation. This year I’ll be discussing how to build on top of that foundation to get better integrated with the security community. Oh and it won’t all be fluffy theoretical drivel … for those interested I’ll be mentioning several services and releasing some really basic Python code to help automate a few of the more mundane Twitter tasks.

The Twitter talk is based around several themes that I’ve touched on before, the most prominent of which is “networking.” And since Twitter is a “social network” I guess that would seem to makes sense. Regardless, Twitter is a great way to connect with other security professionals and interact more with our community as a whole. I’ve solved countless problems over the last few years using my Twitter network and I hope I’ve been able to help others do the same. So please join me at 4:30 PM on Wednesday, August 3rd in Track 2 for some good nuggets that will help you use Twitter to make your day job a little easier.

Like the old adage goes – it’s not what you know … it’s who you know.

How to Win Followers & Influence Friends: Hacking Twitter to Boost Your Security Career

Twitter has become the defacto standard that infosec pros use to communicated with peers and many outside the security community. We share interesting articles, proclaim our opinions, strengthen friendships, build new relationships, and overall become more of a community as a whole. For many Twitter is a chaotic stream of conscience that we both pull and contribute to. This presentation tries to help practicing security professionals reign in the chaos with 5 key strategies that will help you effectively use Twitter to improve your career prospects.

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And if you are still reading all the way down here … congratulations, you may be the lucky winner of a BSidesLV ticket. Just tweet “I’ll be watching @grecs present #HowToWinFollowersAndInfluenceFriends at #BSidesLV.” I’ll choose a random tweet by midnight tonight.

As you may have noticed the past week or so … we’ve published a few local job postings. We feel this is an excellent way to pass on some vetted career opportunities and help us bring in a little cash to cover some of our operational expenses as well as expand the value we can offer you.

Going forward we plan to follow the craigslist model of inexpensively charging companies that want their posts to reach a focused demographic. So instead of companies spending hundreds or possibly thousands to spray a job opportunity across the board, we figured this would be a great way that they could pay a fraction of that to directly reach you all – passionate and motivated information security professionals that already live and work in the metropolitan DC area.

And best of all the first job post is FREE! Subsequent job posts will be just $50 each. Now we don’t want the blog to get inundated with just job postings so we are limiting the number of total job posts to just two per week.

We hope that this offering meets our goals while at the same time passing on great career opportunities to the community. For all the details you can head on over to our official Job Board page.

Amazon $25 Sweepstakes Prize

… at least that’s what the advertisers want to know.

Periodically, I receive emails about opening up advertising more on this site due to our advertise with us page. Unfortunately, many of them want to better understand the demographics of you all before plunking down their hard earned advertising dollars. They just don’t believe me when I tell them 99% single males with lots of expendable cash for electronics and other geek toys.

Well … I’ve procrastinated long enough and have finally gotten around to setting up a demographics survey over at Survey Monkey. It’s a quick set of 10 multiple choice questions so it shouldn’t take you more than 2 minutes to complete.

Knowing that privacy is probably of particular importance to most you, I’ve configured it to be as anonymous as Survey Monkey will allow. Basically, this mean that there is no mapping between your IP address and your responses. Fortunately, none of the questions ask for email addresses, social security numbers, credit cards numbers, or other personal data so you shouldn’t have to worry about any of your sensitive information getting breached (if it hasn’t already).

As you can probably tell by the image at the top of this post, I am putting up a $25 Amazon gift card to help lure you all in. Because of our niche community audience, I imagine that those who complete the survey will have a pretty good shot at winning (1 in 100 worst case).

Click Here to Enter Survey

Anyway, thank you in advance for making time to take this survey. It’s the next step to breaking in even. See ya!

It is with sad news that I announce that we are being forced to close down NovaInfosecPortal.com. Apparently we’ve angered a well funded local political organization through one of our blog posts or tweets and are being threatened with a lawsuit. Given that myself and several other people have run this site on a volunteer basis, we really don’t have any funding to fight back. Due to the nature of the lawsuit I can’t really give too many details here but just wanted to put out a short blog post making this announcement.

Not!

April Fools Day!!!

Bored over the holidays and looking for something to do?

You an infosec professional that lives or works in NoVA, DC, and MD?

Got a topic you want to talk about but no where to post it?

Don’t have time to maintain a full time blog?

Well then we have the answer for you! NovaInfosecPortal.com regularly accepts articles from various locals for publication. It’s a great way to start or expand your personal branding efforts in the infosec field! And even if you already have a blog, reposts of an existing article can help expose your meanderings to different audiences. Need some ideas? Here are a few to get the juices flowing.

• General infosec article (e.g., comment on a news article)
• Paper/presentation requiring feedback (no malicious attachments please!)
• Summary of a local infosec event (e.g., a meetup or conference)
• Good training class or opportunity
• Something you would like to complain about

Contributing is also a great way to help keep this site going if you can’t contribute in another way. It lets us focus on adding new features (and regularly patching so we don’t get hacked) for the rest of the community to enjoy.

If you’d like to contribute, let us know via our Contact Us page or mention @grecs in a tweet.

Notice anything different on our calendar? Well it’s a lot more easy to look at. We made the tough decision earlier this week to cut out two of the hacker spaces – HacDC and Baltimore Node – from the calendar as they just have so many events, it sort of overtook the entire calendar. We are not going to forget them completely though. In our “Where You Want to Be this Week” posts, we’ll be reminding everyone about all the wonderful events they coordinate and to check out their sites for more details.

The folks over at Pauldotcom are participating in the Momember movement. This looks like so much fun and for such a good cause, I thought I’d join and see if there was any interest in anyone else wanting to join a team. Check out the NovaInfosecers Team page or my personal Mo Space page to learn more and get involved. Here is some more information from the official Movember site.

The idea for Movember was sparked in 2003 over a few beers in Melbourne, Australia. The guys behind it joked about 80s fashion and decided it was time to bring the moustache back. In order to justify their Mos (Australian slang for moustache), they used their new looks to raise money for prostate cancer research… never dreaming that facial hair would ultimately lead to a global movement that would get men talking about a taboo subject – their health.

A Mo Bro starts Movember – the month formerly known as November – clean shaven, and grows a moustache all month long, garnering support from friends and family in the form of donations. What’s more, a Mo Bro is a walking billboard for the cause as his new look opens the door for him to talk about cancers affecting men – making the moustache a symbol, much like the pink ribbon is for breast cancer. Each Movember culminates in a Gala Partè in major cities around the globe where Mo Bros dress up to match their Mo, channeling the likes of Tom Selleck, Ghandi and Ron Burgandy, vying for the ultimate accolade: Man of Movember.

It doesn’t look like there are any parties in DC … but maybe one of us can make it to “Man of Movember”. Anyway looks like good fun and an even better cause.

Like we said in our “In Focus: Help Us Help You,” post, we love working on this site and getting the chance to enrich the lives of local security professionals.

In an ideal world, that would be enough to keep it going. Unfortunately, we live in a world where you need resources to keep things running smoothly.

That’s why we offer local professionals and businesses the opportunity to advertise with us. We recently updated our advertising page to include a few advertising options that weren’t there before based on reader feedback and our new site design.

Some of these new features include job postings and posts to promote for-profit events.

The nice thing about advertising with us is that you get to reach an audience that cares about what you’re trying to promote. We only cater to security professionals in the NoVA, MD, and DC area, which gives local businesses a focused demographic that they wouldn’t be able to reach on a more general site.

But even if you’re note looking to buy advertising space with us, that doesn’t mean that we can’t help you get your name out there. If you’re looking to get some free exposure, why not consider being a guest poster for NovaInfosecPortal? Contact us if you’re interested.

Also be sure to check out our advertising page or pass it along to those who might be interested. We’d like to be around for a long time — but we need your help to do it.

In an ideal world, the desire to improve those around you would be enough to make things

, we do need something to keep the site going and all that jazz. The site has really started to grow lately, and we don’t want that growth to slow down due to a lack of financial resources.

Where do you want to be this week? Now you’ll always know with our “Where You Want to Be This Week” feature, which will tell you about infosec meetups happening in your local area as of Sunday night.

• Monday – HacDC Infosec Meetup Monday, 09-28: Microcontroller Mondays (Washington, DC)
• Tuesday – Baltimore Node Meetup Tuesday, 09-29: Normal Meeting (Baltimore, MD)
• Wednesday – CapSecDC Infosec Meetup Event – Wednesday, 09-30: Normal Meeting (Washington, DC)
• Wednesday – InfraGard IMMA Infosec Meetup Event – Wednesday, 09-30: State of Maryland Homeland Security Department (Annapolis Junction, MD)
• Thursday – DojoSec Infosec Meetup Event – Thursday, 10-01: TBD (Laurel, MD)
• Friday – 2600 Group – Baltimore Infosec Meetup Event – Friday, 10-02: Normal Meeting (Baltimore, MD)
• Friday – 2600 Group – Arlington Infosec Meetup Event – Friday, 10-02: Normal Meeting (Arlington, VA)

Be sure to subscribe to our RSS Feed to be alerted about any last-minute events, or to receive updates on the events listed above.

Check out our Calendar for more upcoming events, and follow us @grecs if you’re interested in hearing more security-related babble.