Karma in Community Security Projects
I knew the blog theme would come out eventually…….
Cool friend and great fashion photographer Daniel Cuthbert submitted a nice comment in my blog post about the OWASP Testing Guide tonight. Daniel was the guy convicted of hacking the Tsunami site in the UK and has always sworn his innocence. It was a mad case of justice versus legality.
Looking back OWASP was a great time. I learnt a tremendous amount about people. It really does feel like “deja vu” with the ISM-Community (Information Security Management) that we plan to launch this coming week. I know it’s going to be huge.
It was the early days of OWASP that were the best part for me. I was putting in 60 hours a week sometimes while working a 40 hour week at Charles Schwab.
A lot of people have joked with me that OWASP was my 2nd successful startup after ISS. Putting the structure of things in place for people to flourish is very important. We are doing this now while designing our SourceClear platform; connecting people so they can get on with their jobs.
Finding and working with the very best people is also fantastic. Folks like Daniel, Dinis Cruz, Steve Taylor and Dennis Groves (whom I am now IM’ing with again after several years), David Endler, Ingo Struck, Bill Pennington and many others. I got to meet JD Meier through OWASP. We are about to double in size when our Chief Software Architect joins and we have some fantastic folks lined up to recruit | hunt | press gang | beg | bribe with options. It’s deja vu again.
I spoke tonight to our Chief Software Architect and he mentioned a recent meeting where the CSO mentioned my name and OWASP. I owe OWASP a great deal. It really is a case of karma, I put into the pot unreservedly and got back something commensurate in return.
So I conclude, there is karma in working on community projects and that community projects are like start-ups. You get to work with motivated people passionate about a common cause. At OWASP we wanted to make the web a safer place to be. At SourceClear we want to connect people, process and technology by building innovative security management applications.
PS If there are any CSO’s who are interested in the ISM-Community (Information Security Management Community) and getting involved, pleased drop me a mail. mark at curphey dot com. We have some good banks and corporations already officially involved.
February 25, 2007 at 10:11 pm
Did somebody say “Launch Party at Curphey’s House?”, or is it a different kind of startup? =)