Last month in April 2015 the good folks over at redteams.net held a fundraiser for the MARSOC Foundation. If you are not familiar with the redteams.net site, it is an excellent site overall that covers a wide variety of topics from any thing from redteaming Operations to Gear reviews, of course all with an emphasis on redteaming and the redteam mindset in general. So, if you have never been there go leave this post and go check it out and come back to read this later on!

I donated an undisclosed given sum to the MARSOC Foundation fundraiser held by the redteams.net. Since I like helping where and when I can I do my best to participate in fundraisers like this whenever I can. So, at the end of the fundraiser the folks over at the redteams.net blog would randomly pick a participant and whoever they picked would win a redteams.net patch and a redteams.net book, written by them. This was a plus for me but, I thought to myself, it would be nice to win, but I probably will not, I mean really what are the odds.

Well, to my surprise, the Saturday morning after the fundraiser ended, came and the winner was chosen. I looked at the redteams.net twitter feed to see if by any chance they released the winner yet. And they had, the person they picked had the same initials as I do, well there we go, but it’s probably someone else with the same initials as I. Then I went to check my email, low and behold, I had an email from the people at redteams.net stating I was the winner. Wow, I was shocked! I won! I was thrilled to get the redteams.net patch, especially since I am an avid reader of the blog and LOVE the logos and patches of theirs. In addition to the patch I recieved a redteams.net book as well.

About a month after I recieved my winnings, I finally found some time to sit down and read the redteams.net book. I personally loved the book and it was an easy read, which I believe it was written to be. However, it doesn’t cover any technical aspects of redteaming. Instead it focuses on the redteam mindset, with commentary and quotes within the book in each section. I will read the book again and will incorporate this knowledge into my personal and professional life in a whole. I really think this is a valuable book and hope too see it being sold to the public soon, I already know I will recommend it to all of my family, friends, and colleagues.

I would like to thank the redteams.net site and people for always holding amazing fundraisers for excellent causes and of course for my winnings!

-bl

During this Thanksgiving holiday vacation I took it upon myself to do some fun and interesting reading. The book I chose to escape my vacation reality with and dive into the authors story was Spam Nation, by Brian Krebs. The book has gotten some publicity that I had seen over twitter and of course on Brian Kerbs’s own blog KrebsOnSecurity. Plus, I have thoroughly enjoyed reading Kerbs’s numerous articles on internet crime and information security and thought to myself this ought to be a good read.

Diving right into the book it is informative and easy to understand in my opinion from the technical audience and the less technical all around. For this I applaud, since I think it is very important to educate the less in-the-know people/audience of the problems and issues we face all around within the information security industry. I also enjoyed his (Kreb’s) story of how he wholeheartedly stumbled upon this research and since getting a virus on his own system, has been fascinated and burred himself in the field and learning about the information security and internet crime industries all around. I found all of the chapters to be informative and insightful journey into Kerb’s own research regarding the Pharma Wars and Pharma Affiliate programs promoting Spam as a way to earn money.

I personally find such research fascinating, so nonetheless, I was hooked on the book. Plus, I remember a lot of the botnets discussed in the book used for sending pharma spam out, because I saw a lot of it personally when I was a Sr. Security Analyst at a large healthcare institution. We used to investigate all of this and similar things on a daily basis, so I could personally relate to some of the discussions within the book. I did not put it down until I either fell asleep reading it each day or had to start re-reading pages I zoned out to while reading. The book was overall a good read in my opinion for both technical and non-technical readers out there who are fascinated by the information security industry or the internet crime industry as a whole.

I recommend this book for anyone in the information security industry and I honestly even recommended it to my parents. The latter I did for the simple fact that ever since I made my debut as a information security professional with a real information security job in the industry, I dunno give or take six years ago. They always call me and forward me emails. Sometimes even mail me clippings of articles they think I would be interested in. I politely tell them I could easily read the article online. I digressed, my point being they have become inundated with the media hype of our industry and I think they would simply enjoy this book from the knowledge they would acquire from reading it. It would help them identify suspicious emails and do not fall for such schemes, hopefully.

-bl

PS> I Hope you all had a Happy Thanksgiving!

Welcome to my blog. I am currently experimenting with static blogging and am really enjoying it so far. Overall, this blog is for my personal views and opinions that I have and would like to publish to the world. I am planning on covering topics such as Infromation Security, Crypto-Currency, and Privacy which are some of my interestes and hobbies. Please stay tuned and come back often for more updates and posts.

—bostonlink