An Information Security Place

Douglas Haider (Accuvant wireless guru) and I went to the New Orleans ISACA chapter meeting yesterday.  Douglas was doing a talk on wireless auditing and RFID.  Douglas did his usual great job, and we made some great contacts down there.  I am probably going to be going down next month to give them my talk about using blogs for security research.

But my point to this post is the chapter itself.  These are people who had some pretty bad things happen to them not too long ago.  The city itself is still rebuilding a lot, and here is this little ISACA chapter trying to build up and become a source of information security assistance for the area.  The people trying to get it started seemed to be very dedicated to the cause and were trying to get connected to local ISSA and Infragard chapters as well (I believe they said the local ISSA chapter was in Baton Rouge - about an hour to the west of The Big Easy) to get some kind of local conference going (I mentioned TRISC and how we might be able to give them some benefit of our experience).

I was really impressed by this small group of information security and auditing professionals.  They were extremely hospitable and thankful for Doug and I coming out.  They are really interested in getting speakers out to New Orleans so they can start drawing in more members (kinda the chicken and egg thing - get better speakers to draw more people so you can draw better speakers).  If you are interested in speaking at one of their meetings (usually the second Thursday of each month), let me know and I will get your contact info to them.  They are small (there were about 20 people attending) but passionate, and I think it would be worth your while to give them a shout.

Vet

There is a site out there called CitySec where security professionals all over come together to plan gatherings for information security professionals in their individual cities.  These are not conferences.  They are just ways of sitting own with other security professionals to burn off some steam and network.

Anyway, I am going to start putting an effort towards getting a gathering in Houston, TX.  Each one of these gatherings have individual names (Boston gathering is called BeanSec, Phoenix is called SunSec… you get the idea).  There was a thread started on it before I going down this path, and they wanted to call it HoMeSec (Houston Metro), but there has been no responses lately.  So unless those individuals have any issue with it, I am going to rename it to BayouSec (Houston is known as the Bayou City).  I was going to call it SpaceSec since Houston is also called Space City for NASA, but I thought any security professionals that one day end up on a moon colony might take issue.

So, if you live in the Houston Metro area and would be interested in taking part, let me know.  I am not promising this will be done in the next couple of weeks, but I am going to put some cycles towards getting it done in the next couple of months.  Let me know if you have some ideas and want to help out.

Vet