I’ll apologise up front for the potentially non-security focus of this post, but I thought it was worthwhile to discuss a few things whilst I had WordPress in the forefront of my mind.

After almost five years of working as part of an internal security consulting team for a fairly large bank I decided to hand in my notice and jump into a fresh new venture. For those that don’t know me personally you’ll have to excuse the brief rant about Asterisk Information Security, a company that I am so deeply proud to have helped found with a group of amazing and talented individuals. You see, living in Perth, Australia poses some interesting challenges for those working in security. Not wanting to bad mouth my quaint city, because I love Perth through and through and couldn’t imagine living anywhere else, but I feel we sometimes have what I’ve titled the “Perth-delay”. That is, in general, the understanding, addressing and focus on security problems seems to lag behind the rest of Australia, which sometimes (though of course not always), seems to lag behind the rest of the world.

This phenomena is in no way without exceptions, because that is certainly the case, we have a tonne of excellent and amazing security people, and perhaps per-capita Australia is in fact swinging above its weight, but I look around various businesses in Perth (and if you follow Australian financial news, you’ll know that WA is kicking some serious ass. Some financial analysts have started to have to remove WA statistics because the outlying nature of our ‘boom’ is impacting their work), and I’m amazed that not more companies like Asterisk exist. Sure, there are firms that have security expertise, some that have great people, but none that have a 100% focus on information security, from information security management, through security architecture, infrastructure, assessments and application security, that are located entirely here in Perth. It’s this that makes me the most excited.

So what does this mean for un-excogitate.org? Well, it just means I’m splitting myself a little bit, this domain, and this blog will still remain, but as I’m trying to focus my technical efforts through Asterisk, it’ll likely be there. What about all the BeEF stuff? Well, we’ve also recently set up a blog over there too, which if you haven’t checked out, you certainly should.

What else has been going on? I was super fortunate to be over in Sydney for OWASP’s AppSec APAC conference last month. It was a great experience to meet a bunch of awesome people, re-meet a different bunch of awesome people, and get on my high-horse about BeEF. My talk, “Shake Hooves with BeEF” went down well, you can grab my deck (and a bunch others) over here.

Thank you all for your support, and I hope to keep you informed on how all this pans out in the future.

-c