Tag: community

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Reviving OWASP Bangalore Chapter

Update – Jan’ 13th, 2014: I’m excited to let you know that Bangalore OWASP chapter has been up and running, and growing for the last three years now. I no longer live in Bangalore, but the chapter and its people remain a source of knowledge exchange (read, nerd-talk). For more information, check out the OWASP Bangalore homepage.
If need be, you may contact the chapter leads Akash Mahajan (akash [DOT] mahajan {AT} owasp [DOT] org), and KV Prashant (kvprashant {AT} owasp [DOT] org.)

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The OWASP Bangalore Chapter met after almost an year today, and I was priviledged to be a part of it. As happens often with technical groups, including LUGs (Linux User Groups), they tend to loose participation and go to indefinite hibernation mode. OWASP-Bangalore’s fate was no different.

Meeting room stencil graffiti by -- flickr.com/photos/clagnut/252185030/

Anyhoo! The important point is that we finally met today. There were around 12 peole who turned up, and boy, It’s always an honour to meet enthusiastic people from the Security community. Minutes of the meeting will be posted by Hari, Chapter coordinator, pretty soon on the OWASP-Bangalore mailing list. To cut things short, we discussed and decided on a couple of points to revive the Bangalore Chapter. I’ll personally be looking forward to spreading the information to younger audience. So, just in case you are a part of some College around Bangalore, feel free to drop me a note. We’d love to visit your campus and deliver talks, free of charge. 🙂
As for the regular meetings, we’ve decided to meet every fourth Wednesday of the month. Venues will of course, keep changing.

p.s. I love the song “Jaane Kya Baat Hai” from the movie Sunny. But somehow, I am not able to get the other song,”Aur Kya Ahde Wafaa Hote Hain”, out of my mind since morning. Not that I am complaining 😉

Aur Kya Ahede Wafa…
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SecurityCamp is here, where are you?

Update: OWASP Bangalore Chapter is meeting on 29th June, i.e. Sunday, morning at 9:00 AM at Indian Coffee House. M.G. Road, Bangalore. Join us, if you can.

I feel extremely glad to announce that Security Camp, the first security Barcamp in Bangalore (as far as as I know) is on12th of July. It’s being hosted by RSA.

by flickr.com/photos/place_light/15355970/

Being a FOSS and NGO enthusiast, I am big fan of communities and highly respect the power they can unleash towards the motive. I have always felt that the Security community in India could be a little more organized and visible. Unfortunately, all I have seen till now is a couple of mailing lists (which are really good btw), some hacker gamers (who game all night long 🙂 ), and a couple of small conferences (like Club Hack, OWASP’s Mumbai meet). Although these deserve respect in their own right, but there’s always scope for a lot more, especially the visibility factor. Now, this BarCamp isn’t going change everything overnight (in fact the number of registrations are pretty low), but I am happy to see yet another one popping up. Luckily, Harinath, the chapter lead of OWASP-Bangalore, has called for revival of the chapter. I am hoping that we meet at Security Camp and come up with a survival plan 🙂

But again, firstly I wish I can make it to the Security Camp. We, at office, are expecting some OpenSocial related work in the first week of July, which probably means no Saturdays and no Sundays 😐 I was also hoping to visit the meet with my Geeky-partner Johnny ;), but he’d be out of town. No complaints though, he’d be talking at GUADEC 🙂 (uh, who came up with that acronym?)

I am sincerely hoping to be able to make it (and may be take my team there too). If I do, I’ll probably talk about a small research I did towards Designing a Phishing/Fraud IDS. Apart from the fact that I tried talking about it during DevCamp (where my lappy didn’t work with the projector and I’d to hold it in my hand 🙁 ), I’ve been sleeping on it. Mostly because there’s lot to be done to reduce the false-positives, which is anyways the case with all IDSes.

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A new home for us :)

Link

People who know me, know that I desist Social networking portals. Don’t worry, this post isn’t another rant. It’s more of an announcement that I’ve joined a Social Network 🙂

Yup! The guys at GNUCitizen have started a social network for hackers, and very intelligently named it House of Hackers. I’d like to call it HoH (as in Hah!) 🙂

House of Hackers

A few motives cited for creation of the network are:

  • To provide platform for hackers to exchange ideas, communicate, or/and even form groups -elite or otherwise. Although Slackers is an amazing place to communicate, web is never big enough for two similar houses. Moreover, they aren’t same, just similar
  • Create a Hacker recruitment market. Recruiters could advertise to recruit/hire people from here. The best part of this, as cited, would be that HoH would eliminate any middleman (or you employer), and hence help you earn more. Pretty obviously, this holds meaning for elite ones only. But then I have always believe that you can learn only to the extent you can challenge yourself… and good company definitely challenges you 🙂
  • Fund Research programs from time to time. Not so long ago, Ronald came up with idea of Router Hacking Challenge, where you had to hack your own router and make the findings public. The _cutest_ hack would be regarded the best. GNUCitizen (Ronald is now a part of GNUCitizen) hosted the contest. I mention this just to affirm that I really like the guys at GNUCitizen, and I am really excited to know that they’d be encouraging the community (and funding them too). The money is expected to come from the recruitment advertisements.

Needless to summarize that I am keeping my eyes open, fingers crossed and hoping that this turns out to be a great venture for the community.

Just one concern, these %*^*@#$ hackers will keep screwing the portal networking portal, you know. 😉

My profile link.