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.

As you know “calendaring” is something we do a lot of around NovaInfosecPortal. We have our calendar that focuses on meetups and conferences around NoVA, DC, and southern MD. In populating the conferences portion of this calendar, we not only rely people tweeting about them and visiting various meetup and conference websites but also hit up a lot of general security calendar sites to verify we didn’t miss anything happening local. So when follow DC infosec professional and artist Jack “@sintixerr” Whitsitt sent out the following tweet a few weeks ago it got me thinking.

“@sintixerr is there a good list or calendar or upcoming security/hacker conferences for the year? #“

I’ve seen this question before and have come across several lists like this over the years. As a matter of fact there is one post in particular that got me started on this whole idea of running some type of list or calendar. I didn’t want to just recreate yet another calendar but something that would be useful for people on a continual basis. This goal is what led me to include meetups as well. Of course trying to run a calendar with both conferences and meetups on a worldwide scale is next to impossible. That’s when I decided to just focus on the local DC area. This made things much more manageable!

As you can imagine in narrowing down to this niche, we’ve come across a lot of different conference calendars over the years and I thought I’d share this list with everyone. Here is my prioritized list with some commentary on each one.

• Information Security Events: I’m not really sure who owns this calendar but it contains most of the well known security conferences as well as associated CFP deadlines for them. Google Calendar is used as a source so you get direct access as well as many of the other Google features (e.g., importing ICS into your own calendar).
• Infosec Events North America & Worldwide Conferences and Workshops: Here are two nice little infosec event calendars that focus on North America and the rest of the world. Direct links are also provided to their Google Calendar feeds, which provides a bunch of other nice
  features as discussed above.
• Help Net Security Conferences Listing: This site is not only a great news resource but they also run a very comprehensive calendar of infosec events. It features a filtering capability that lets you quickly find events by month, quarter, and/or continent.
• The Ethical Hacker Network Conference Calendar: Not only is this a great calendar of infosec conferences but each event also has its own forum thread where EHN registered users can discuss each conference.
• Crucial Point Federal Technology Events: This calendar contains many of the federal technology events and a fair portion of what they list is infosec related. Again, they are hosted on Google Calendar so it supports all their features. For more federal events they recommend checking out GovEvents.com.
• DC Tech Events: Although not a pure infosec calendar, many of the local security events usually end up there. You can subscribe to get their events via email, import their iCal feed into your own personal calendar, or follow them on Twitter at @dctechevents to stay abreast of their posted events.

If you know of any other calendars that I may have missed please add a comment below, Contact Us, or mention it to me (@grecs) on Twitter. I hope to keep this list updated as a resource for people to use. And of course if you’re local to DC, our full calendar should have pretty much everything you need.

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In creating a locally focused infosec site, I’ve also come across other resources besides calendars that I’d like to share over the next few weeks or months. So keep an eye out here for more non-NoVA, DC, & MD resources that I found over the years. See ya! This post’s image was from Western Michigan University.

It’s no secret that we here at NovaInfosecPortal like to provide useful information to security professional that live and work in the NoVA, MD, and DC area. You don’t have to look much further than our Resource pages and Event pages to see that.

But recently we realized that, despite having all of this awesome information, a lot of people don’t know that we have it. Many people think that all we do is event posts.

While we’re ‘known’ for our event posts, events aren’t all that we do. NovaInfosecPortal has always been a site dedicated to building a stronger security community in the NoVA, MD, and DC area, and we believe that you need a lot of information—not just events posts—to meet that goal.

To put a focus on some of the areas of NovaInfosecPortal (other than our event posts) that promote the local security community, we’ll be doing a weekly feature called “In Focus” for the next few months. This feature will cover aspects of the site that aren’t widely known in the hope that you’ll have a few more ways to get active in the local security community and that you’ll be able to get more out of this site.

The first thing we’ll be featuring? Why, the calendar, of course.

While we’ll usually link to the calendar at the bottom of our event posts, we’ve recently heard that a lot of people don’t know it’s there. Since we feel that the Calendar is one of the most important offerings of our site, we wanted to show that the Calendar is alive and well and designed to make your life easier.

Available through XML, iCAL, or HTML feeds, we designed the Calendar with you in mind. We wanted you to have all of the events for the upcoming month in one easy-to-use feature. And we don’t just include local meetups; we also include conferences on the calendar.

The other great thing about our calendar is that it’s updated on a regular basis. We do the best that is humanly possible to get obscure and last-minute meetups on our Calendar so that you don’t have to miss out on great events.

We also take suggestions for meetups that we should add to the Calendar. If you know of a local security group that isn’t already featured on our Calendar, or you’re planning on starting one, please drop us a line. We would love to help spread the word about your event!

But enough hearing about it; why don’t you go and check it out for yourself? And if you have the inclination, why not tell us what you think?

After many requests to have our Full Calendar page support XML and iCAL feeds, we have ported everything over to a public Google Calendar.

Because having these feeds pulls you away our site, we ask that you still visit our site to get additional details about events posted on the calendar, or consider sponsoring the calendar for $2 a month or $20 a year through becoming a subscriber to our site. Visit our Help Us Help You page to become a subscriber through PayPal.

While we understand that a lot of you already belong to professional organizations and are tired of hearing the “support us” mantra at every turn, we do ask that you strongly consider sponsoring NovaInfosecPortal so that it can continue to foster the growing infosec community in the NoVA, DC, and MD area.

On that note, we are also looking for companies to sponsor the calendar, so if you own or work for a company that would be interested, please Contact Us about sponsorship opportunities.

Well, that’s all for now; enjoy the new calendar, and don’t forget to check out our NovaInfosec Twits page if you haven’t already. See you all at ShmooCon!

In an effort to help everyone plan a little bit more in advance, we’ve added a calendar for events that take place in or around NoVA. Currently, we’re just beta testing it to see how it works out. Please feel free to let us know what you think in the comments for this post. Also, use our Contact Us page to submit events that you would like added to the calendar. I’m hoping that in the future we can set something up so anyone can add events (with a little moderation of course ). Any suggestions would be appreciated. You may have also noticed that we added a ShareThis capability in our posts and pages. Hopefully, this feature will make it easier for you to pass along any nuggets to other infosec professionals. Enjoy!