First of all, all of the tools that I’ve purchased from hak5 are items that I’ve purchased with my own money for use in my roles as an information security engineer. Generally speaking, my day-to-day is a mixture of threat detection, incident response, and providing guidelines and guidance to keep our infrastructure secure. I did some red teaming in my previous roles, but, it wasn’t anything formal: running things like wp-scan automatically against our wordpress instances to make sure that the developers hasn’t inadvertently kept in a plugin that should have been updated due to a security issues.…

I’ve been on a fairly big GIS kick recently. Part of it is me feeling like there’s a lack of market tools for things like studying things like resource deserts, but, the other half is me wondering, “How many oil change places are within a 15 minute drive,” looking for things like resource saturation within a specific industry and possible geopolitical research (for example: OpenStreetMap + Census Data + Political data could be a tool to allow campaigns to better target their advertising dollars to allow for a more focused spend).…

I spent a little bit of time tonight looking for one of my lost friends – only to discover that she passed away last year, ended up in a pauper’s grave, and her mom is still posting “where Is my daughter” posts on Facebook. She wasn’t the type of person who would constantly text me, but, every few weeks, she’d ask how I was, and we’d spend an hour or so talking: mainly because we always wanted to catch up.…

So, let me preface this with: I’m generally responsible for the Information Security at where I work. There are others on my team, but, I’m very fortunate that I have bosses that (generally) support what I do and give me wide latitude to do what’s needed to get things done. I stopped by Denver a few weeks ago to spend some time with some coworkers that I’ve wanted to meet. As part of the process, he mentions to me, “We’ll have to meet on the 5th floor; I don’t have my keycard to get Into my office (on a different floor) and I don’t want to bug the community staff to let me in”…