Before we get into it…
Let’s start this off the right way. Thank you readers, community contributors, and supporters! We say this every year and each year it means more to us than you will know. As the Information Security community continues to grow, we would be remiss to not give a recap of what we (Not just the HM staff, but community members as well!) have accomplished! We have exciting products in store for everyone in 2019 and are thrilled to share them!
2018, How’d it go?
Well… We started off 2018 thinking Hackmethod readers and community members would benefit from a few different courses with VMs, student guides, and lab guides. As you may have figured out, that didn’t happen due to HM management shuffles and our day jobs expecting more from us than usual, that doesn’t mean it won’t happen. With that said, we did manage to accomplish some other great things instead.
Community
First off, community is life and without it we would be lost. Learning from each other and sharing our experiences helps define us as security professionals. As we’ve stated before, we see it in our own professional experiences in incident response, threat hunting, or just solving problems. We, as professionals, cannot solve everything on our own and rely on brainstorming sessions, discussions, lunch-n-learn lessons, and just asking a peer. We have heavily advertised our slack channel to give users/readers/community leaders direct interaction with each other. It gives the HM community the accessibility, features, and user friendly atmosphere we are always looking for. Since starting our Slack channel, it has grown to 168 users and continues to grow every month thanks to the community!
CTF
Second, if you haven’t noticed, Hackmethod and the community have decided to make the CTF an annual (date TBD) contest instead of a monthly release of challenges. We saw the stress adding up and amount of work it took to maintain a constant release of challenges. inCIDRthreat has been the primary contributor and maintainer for HMCTF. The HMCTF site is still active and running and will eventually be updated with majority of 2017-2018 challenges that were previously released. So check it out and remember to visit often. Announcements will be made when challenges are added.
Other Achievements
- Hackmethod became official! We are now Hackmethod, LLC. Woo Hoo!
- Launched a store front for those wanting to get something in return for supporting HM. We decided to call it “Mal_Wear by HM” and are using it to fund community projects and giveaways.
- Had a meetup at DEFCON this year with the few community members able to attend.
- Hosted our first giveaway as Hackmethod, LLC.
- 3595 Actions taken (subscribes, follows, likes, etc)
- 481 User submits
- Tyler Schroder was our winner, Congrats again!
- Our very own rstoner started his own Consulting Company and celebrated the birth of his first child. Congrats RStoner & Family!
- Partnered with HumbleBundle to support various InfoSec related charities. Through the community we’ve raised a total of $463.34 USD for Electronics Frontier Foundation, Innocent Lives Foundation, and Game Changer Organization
- Started a youtube and twitch channel! Where community members can stream with content approval.
- 199 mailing list subscribers
- 542 Twitter Followers
- 3,287 Facebook likes
Welcome, 2019!
Third, this year we’ve got some great things planned and we hope to make you all a part of them.
- Community Building – More social media presence so we can stay more engaged with the Information Security community. We are still hoping to define, build, and mentor an in house CTF team or partner with another InfoSec community like NetSecFocus to compete at some of the top CTF events this year. We have plans to host another meetup at Defcon/BlackHat/HackFest in 2019, everyone that shows up will get an HM sticker and possibly a NetSecFocus sticker if they can get their designed finished in time. Getting to know the members of this great community means a lot. We are also hosting a T-Shirt Design Contest in January with a 1st, 2nd, and third place winners. Prizes will include Raspberry Pi’s or Amazon gift cards and $50 NoStarch Press ebook vouchers.
- Products – Still striving for this, we’re going to release a comprehensive course on tunneling this year–complete with study guides, lab guides, and an accompanying VM. inCIDRthreat and EPI are hard at work on the development but it is in the early stages. Release date TBD. Education should be accessible to everyone and we still hold that as a core belief, all material for this course will range from $10-15/person. Video content TBD. Scott is hard at work brewing up a Threat Hunting with Elastic stack course using open source software that should be ready for a beta testers sometime in the 1st quarter of 2019 (possibly March). You can get updates, early access invites and so-forth by joining the mailing list here or becoming a Patreon here.
- Community Outreach – Just like in 2018, we want to sponsor students, CTF teams or individuals that need help jump starting their career with educational material, training cost or equipment.
Final Words
Finally, as we move forward, again we want to thank you for all the support. This is our hobby and our passion but without the kind words, donations, and overall help from you guys, we wouldn’t be where we are today. In 2018 we missed a few marks but still made progress. In 2019, we set our goals a bit more attainable and to be just as progressive as our previous year’s goals. We’re looking forward to bringing it all to you. If you’re interested in anything we’ve got going on or feel you can contribute, you know where to find us or if you don’t use slack, drop us an email at admin@hackmethod.com
Have a Happy New Year and as always, we’ll see you on the internet!
