Regular readers here will recognise that if there’s one thing I’m generally not short of, it’s security stuff to talk about and personal opinions on the whole thing (maybe that’s two things). Oh and there’s also the thing about spending a whole heap of time writing security training material for Pluralsight and maintaining Have I been pwned? which all keeps me rather immersed in what I reckon is a very exciting industry. I mean what’s not to love in an industry where the pendulum regularly swings from extremes such as attackers hacking modems to hijack traffic and buy Brazilian hookers through to Obama getting up and admonishing the Axis of Evil themselves for pwning Sony over a crappy movie. It’s non-stop infosec action.
The other day, Windows IT Pro asked me if I might like to start writing a weekly column on the wonderful world of cyber-security, cyber-hackers and cyber-sensationalism. Wait – what?! No really, my view is that all too often it is sensationalism and that amidst all the excitement we somehow lose track of the fundamentals. They gave me enough free reign to shape the column in a way that I thought would really resonate with people and so here it is – “Security Sense” – and the intro to it just went out today.
Unlike my frequently verbose and often highly technical blog posts, Security Sense will be closer to a one-pager each week and targeted at a broader audience. There’ll inevitably be parallels with other things I write or talk about, but I’ll keep it higher level and more consumable than a lot of my other material. It gives me a great platform to reach a broader audience and by all accounts, it addresses an areas where there’s a huge amount of interest at the moment.
For those unfamiliar with Windows IT Pro, it’s run by Penton who’ve been doing this sort of thing for 110 years. Not all of them on the web, of course, but they’ve got somewhat of a track record when it comes to publishing. The site serves a community of over 2.7 million IT pros, developers, partners and providers so there’s a good number of eyeballs on their content.
I really hope it appeals to my existing audience as well as appeals to a whole new one I don’t normally reach. My first column has already been submitted and will go out shortly. I’ll be communicating new articles via social media and engaging in discussion on the Windows IT Pro in context of the articles so I hope to see a bunch of you there in the future. Enjoy!