HACKINT

Hello all,

I’ve let updates here slip a bit unfortunately so it’s past time that I post something new. The past few months have been incredibly busy for myself personally (from starting my PhD at King’s College London to starting a small tech company with some friends) as well as with hackINT. With hackINT I’ve been able to talk with an additional couple people about them developing and teaching classes that we can offer out for free. Luckily these are some passionate and talented individuals so I’m looking forward to what they can bring to the team. The problem is always based around organizing and bringing this talent together on the side of our day jobs and lives. I can happily report though that things are steadily moving forward.

The last couple months have also seen a number of new classes taught. I was able to teach another couple classes on base in Wiesbaden, Germany to some really motivated US Military members who wanted to learn more; specifically I was teaching the Introduction to Digital Forensics class. In addition to that I was able to teach the same class at two German based hackerspaces which was an incredible experience getting to train some amazing individuals truly passionate about this material. With training in person though on my weekends (sometimes as much as every other weekend) I have admittedly failed in launching the website according to my own timeline.

I’ve been teaching at Utica College and revamping the syllabus for some of the courses there as well as developing the new Adv Topics in Cyber Operations Class. My students there have showed me that there is more need than ever for free training that is available to people at all points in their career. My students are talented but face a lack of training available to them usually due to a high price or just general lack of options. So I’m continuing my push to take hackINT to a more public level and still planning on launching the website. Instead of announcing set deadlines though I’m just going to promise that I’m putting quite a bit of what time I do have into getting the courses ready. My interaction with the students at Utica College have also encouraged me to change my format from just offering the training styled videos into also adding more full length courses where I give hackINT students videos, readings, and assignments over an 8 week period that they may follow on at their own pace. In this way, the students will be able to have a more formal, guided, and free ability to gain education on hacking and security topics instead of just training (a good discussion on what education vs training is can be had later but the basis is providing science and theory with a little reinforcement vs. primarily hands on experience).

My new few months are looking pretty exciting. I’ll be at TROOPERS presenting on the importance of privacy to security in March, presenting on my book SCADA and Me at the SANS ICS Summit in March, and likely traveling to S4 in Jan. I have a few new articles coming out in journals and magazines and will be sure to post what I can publish out here as well. To all of you I appreciate the patience, I hope you’ve been able to catch me in one of the classes I’ve been offering, and if not I’ll be sure to see some of you around. There will be a few classes hosted in Wiesbaden in Jan and a few at Ramstein in Feb. I’ll see you around and until then keep the passion and keep hacking.

Rob