I started this security blog in the the middle of September 2010. By that point, I’ve been a contributor to several blogs at that point, including SANS Internet Storm Center and SANS Computer Forensics, and have written my share of articles and book chapters. Yet, I wanted a venue for jotting down my thoughts even if they were not yet completely fleshed out. I wanted an opportunity to receive quick feedback from other professionals. I wanted to motivate myself and others to contribute to online discussions in which the security community is engaged.

"The Zeltser Challenge"

I decided to impose upon myself the rule of posting to the blog daily for at least a year. Though hard, the practice of writing regularly has encouraged me to read more and is making it easier to tackle new writing projects. To ease the workload a bit, I decided to “cheat” a bit by posting a list of my favorite security reads of the week every Saturday and an interesting quote on Sundays.

Some friends in the security community liked the idea of aiming to write one post per day and decided to challenge themselves to do the same. David Cowen called this the Zeltser challenge when he decided to give it a try. Matt Bromiley took on the challenge as well, as did Stacey Randolph! If you end up deciding to do this, let me know :-)

Where to Focus?

One of the challenges I've faced when writing this blog is not being able to focus it on any particular area of information security. As the result, the topics I covered included social networking risks, malicious software, social engineering, IT career development, cloud security, incident response, and others. I suppose the multi-disciplinary coverage of this security blog can be viewed as its feature.

Here’s a word cloud that represents the top words I used in my blog in 2010:

Staying Active Elsewhere, Too

What about Twitter? I remain active there. I consider Twitter a great platform to curate content across the web and to interact with people in short character bursts. Yet, Twitter to me is mostly a way to consume content. I started this blog to contribute content, sharing whatever insights I amassed while focusing on information security throughout my career so far.

An important factor that motivates me to keep up with this blog is the feedback I receive from the readers in the form of tweets, blog postings and emails. Thank you for reading my notes and for taking the time to respond!

I'm writing this note on December 31, 2010, as I look forward to a fruitful 2011. (I updated this note in December 2016 and then again in June 2018 to include links to participants of "the Zeltser challenge.")