Jack Rhysider, Give Yourself a Blog for Christmas | KringleCon 2020

ho ho ho i just got done talking with santa and he thinks it would be a great idea if you were to give yourself a blog for christmas or this could be a talk that is why i t security uh people need blogs and i think you should all have blogs that you're writing um here's the reasons why so i'm jack resider i was a network security engineer for 10 years um i was configuring firewalls troubleshooting them ids's ips's syslogs you know you name it but then i uh started a blog and then i became a podcaster and at this point i have four different blogs and i think blogs are great and i'll try to convince you to get your own blog my first blog was written in 2010 and i had some reasons why i decided to blog first i wanted to remember the problems that i was how to solve problems i was solving in the past like i would um configure something and i would have a configuration that i would apply or i would type in a command that had some weird you know dashes and weird switches at the end i couldn't remember what those things were how did i do that i totally forgot i tried looking at my notebooks tried looking at emails couldn't remember i don't remember so where was i putting that stuff i wasn't putting it anywhere and you know that's not a good idea people were asking me for help all the time hey you're good at troubleshooting this you go to troubleshooting that come on over to my desk yeah help me out with this and that sort of thing and um you know i'd have to write full-on emails like here's how to troubleshoot this and here's what the backup plan is and the strategies and all these things um and send them out and i was doing that over and over and over and over i was getting pretty repetitive i realized my impact was limited on what i was doing on the world right so the only people who i i thought i was a good network security engineer but the only people who could even vouch for me or a test for me were my co-workers and my customers these are the only people who knew i existed as a network security engineer like i was valuable to them but nobody else on the planet knew who i was or you know if i was good or not and so that was okay but if i were to ever leave that job now i gotta start at square one where i have to build my reputation all the way from scratch once again and that is a big task right so how can i impact more people with the knowledge i have and another thing was that i would sometimes face problems that nobody knew the answer to and they were winging it and they were given wrong solutions and not very helpful at all um or you know i was you know googling an error code and there would be no answers for that on google like basically that error code has never been seen on the internet ever before and i'm like how is this possible and so when you're when you're seeing lots of wrong information or seeing no information at all on a problem you got to go off the map and solve it on your own and figure it out and when you figured out maybe you can like help the internet right like look somebody else has got to have this error code what did why don't i blog about it just like show people how to do it and lastly this is a weird one but it's so true um i in 2010 i was dating at the time and i didn't have a website or blog or anything and this woman i was dating was not an i.t tech person at all like she didn't even care for it at all or couldn't figure out much of it yet she had a website that she put together somehow i have no idea how and it was popular it was like getting talked about on social media and stuff and i'm just like how is it that you have a bigger web presence than me and i've spent the last 20 years of my life in front of this computer learning how to build websites and coding and breaking breaking things and fixing things and yet you have somehow gotten more stuff out on the internet than i have this is ridiculous i definitely need to represent myself properly online by having a website at least and a blog is a ver a great first website to make because it's easy to make it's got a low barrier of entry and you you can be very valuable but what do you write on it well obviously those obscure commands that i would rarely use but how would the look up i have to look it up every time i want to use it like the find command on linux for some reason i can never remember what it looks like or how to take a screenshot on mac os what are these magic buttons right so i'd look this up every time might as well put it on my blog so it's easy for me to find i don't have to like click around on a few websites to figure out exactly what it is i'm looking for i know i've done this command before it's on my blog go there real quick done i've got the answer um how to shoot troubleshoot problems i face regularly but you know if i'm hitting that same problem over and over and i'm not documenting how i'm solving it i'm starting at square one every time and when somebody else needs help troubleshooting that then they like where do we go like so if i could just troubleshoot this is or document how i troubleshot this here's how i fixed it then i can use that again over and over as like a guide on how to fix it in the future especially when you get woken up at like 2 a.m because you're on call and they're like we've got this problem and you're like i have no idea who i even am or what my name is at 2am much less how to troubleshoot this really obscure problem so having like a nice documentation on how you troubleshot it in the past is such a lifesaver um obviously problems that google couldn't solve were great things that i could blog about see the thing is a lot of people don't know what to blog about they think oh i could blog about the news i could blog about my observations in the infosec space or you know come up with new innovative ideas for the future no forget about all that no you're not trying to impress anyone you're just there to document the problems you've solved and that would be great the world needs more of that absolutely more of that if i ever took a class which i took lots of classes on you know ceh and and cisco networking and juniper networking i was notating all that right in my blog like that was my note keeper was my blog like i was just had my blog open i was just writing how to do this and that in the class straight onto my blog and it was getting blogged um because that's what i mean how were you going to keep your notes from the class you might as well make them public like you know you kept them there like it's a backup strategy too for your information right um anytime i had a video i saw a video on youtube that i liked that was you know i t security i would comment on it put it on the blog and sometimes i would get really you know into it and start building like javascript tools and stuff to help me do things like subnet calculators and hash analyzers and stuff and yeah that was cool yeah you know i'm just building cool things i'm learning coding like i'm practicing i.t stuff um any time i left lessons learned i would blog about like i learned don't ever use debug all on a cisco router because it could break the router right so um yeah i mean junior junior engineers were asking me what was some of the things you did wrong you know coming up i got a whole blog on all the things i did wrong so like uh you know what where do we want to start right so that was a good lesson for other people as well and then um any sort of video lessons that i created i would blog about too because i'd make a video like here's how to upgrade this firewall or something like that and i would post that and then that was a great place to put it on the blog so with that a blog was born and i made the website tunnelsup.com in 2010 and yep just had a bunch of articles and some tools and cheat sheets and things and what happened when i did this well the internet corrected me that's what's going to happen right and that's great if it happens because you're trying to be a good engineer or or a security person or i.t person and now the internet is saying well you did that wrong uh here's how you could do it better or something like that that's only going to make you better that's going to improve you tremendously when somebody comes along and says did you ever consider using this command instead this would be a lot easier if you did it this way or whatever and now you can say oh yeah here's why that's a good idea or here's why that's not a good idea and you can have like really good conversations about that um i actually literally got job offers not like full-on come work for a company but like i'm hitting this problem i can't figure it out can i hire you for the weekend you know for like four hours like that that kind of thing um just like be a consultant for me for a couple hours and let's get on a video sharing and you know show me what commands i'm not getting right so uh yeah i mean that that happened like people did not see my resume they don't know who i am and yet they're letting me they're giving me the option to put hands on on their uh you know in in their routers and firewalls like whoa how did that happen um strangers would write to me and just thank me and that's such a great feeling when you put something out there and people are like i've looked all over the internet i couldn't find the answer you had it right there at the top of your page thank you so much and they'd sometimes go even further and send me money like five or ten dollars each uh you know at a time and that was amazing when somebody like i appreciate somebody appreciate me so much they wanted to buy me coffee or something like that was awesome um and so that grew like who appreciated me outside my co-workers and customers right so now my twitter was growing because i'm posting it on twitter now i'm getting accepted to speak at conferences because my name is becoming more more known out there oh yeah that's the blog we know about um i got accepted for other things because it's like hey i'm a blogger i can i can come uh you know test your product and blog about it or something you know you can you can do all kinds of different things with it so yeah i people became you know i became known outside of that little circle of people who knew that i was good right so now more people think i'm good which is great because now if i ever have to move jobs or do something else i'm not so scared about it right i mean i'm already getting job offers for people to come get you know have me come help them on the weekends so i can you know create relationships there and stuff and um you know if i need a job i could just put it on the blog and say oh i'm looking for a job here and there so like it really getting outside that immediate circle of who knows that you're good and letting the world know you're good can really be it can really open a lot of doors and another thing is i use the blog all the time because i was referencing it to troubleshoot certain things and to look up commands um so yeah i was like the biggest user for sure and that's then that's what kind of goes back to what do you blog about do you buy do you write like lengthy articles and poetry and stuff no man write stuff that you want to read because i'm putting stuff up there that i'm like going back to and like oh yeah what was that what was that error code that um you know what does that mean that erica i know i blogged about that so let me go there and see um and you could like kind of eject stuff out of your head and say i don't have to memorize what that error code is i have i have the website right here that i can go to anytime so um another thing is is because co-workers stopped asking me as many questions right hey jack can you come to help me troubleshoot this i've seen you troubleshoot this before you know all about this forget it uh here's a link or i'll type up how to troubleshoot it and instead of sending them the email on how to troubleshoot it i would just blog it and then say here's a link to my blog read about it there if you have problems i'll be happy to come over and help right and so now they were learning oh i'll just check the blog first see if he's hit this problem before and if not i'll ask him about it right so um they were actually asking me less because they were looking at my blog first it was incredible so what's so hopefully this has convinced you you're ready to start a blog let's get a new one new year starting 2021 start it out with a blog here's some of the blog options for 2021. wordpress is still pretty popular um it's really user friendly however uh it runs php which can be pros and cons like so the pros are like you have access to this amazing backend that you can configure to do all kinds of cool things and and you know it's cool but you can build extra tools and stuff however php is riddled with vulnerabilities and so you need to keep it updated and then the same thing with wordpress you need to keep it updated because it has vulnerabilities and all the plugins that wordpress has have vulnerabilities so you need to update the plugins too so there's just a lot of updates that have to go on on wordpress you could self-host it or you can have them host it for you but yeah those are kind of the pros and cons i prefer jekyll and ghost right now these are static html website generators what that means is that i kind of have the cms the content management system on my computer and it has the ruby and it has the python to render to take these uh this blog and to turn it into static html so it kind of compiles it and renders it to just be at the end of the day html css and javascript and that is that's it it has no back end and so when i when i upload it i can send it to just anything that can host a file so it can be an aws s3 server it can be a github page and if you don't know you know github is a place to store files but github pages is a place to display that in like a website view but github doesn't have a back end you can't configure php or something to you know control your website from from github pages and same with aws it just hosts static pages and so that's a perfect combination for for jekyll or ghost to then to then go up to uh you know one of those places medium.com is a place to blog um this is probably the easiest to get started you just create an account and go there's no picking a theme or configuring anything you're just like this is what you get and you you can't really like advertise on it or or you know put google ads or anything in there if that's what you want to do too because uh they've kind of they've got it pretty locked down so um yeah it's it's not really customizable but it's simple to get started and wix and squarespace are just kind of a step above that where you can totally customize it you can change the way the theme looks or the font or you move and drag and drop graphics around it's real simple um and you can use it as a blog too so um hopefully that's inspired you to like go get a blog started make give yourself a blog for christmas i think it would be a great um thing for you to do and i would love to see it so if you do make a blog from this video please show it to me i can't wait to see what you've made um and honestly the thing is that i blogged for seven years and then i started to make a podcast and i don't think i would have had the confidence or the ability to do it if i wasn't blogging first because i'm putting stuff out there in the world and i'm nervous what the world is going to think of it right as a blogger and after a while you just get used to it like oh yeah people are throwing rocks that's fine i'm used to it this is valid this is not valid and you're explaining things you know complex topics and you're just going through the motions over and over and over and you get good at presenting and teaching and it wasn't if i didn't have all that seven years of blogging i don't think my podcast would be popular as popular it is because it just that was a skill that i kind of needed to skill up on before i could do it so i'm not saying go create a podcast afterwards but i'm just saying the doors have opened in so many new ways and now i'm a full-time podcaster podcasting about cyber security so and that's a dream come true that i can just do that thing on my own and it's amazing so i mean that's possible so yeah i hope this has been inspirational to you to go make a blog and i can't wait to see it have a good kringle con and happy holidays

Channel: KringleCon

Views: 1,634

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: Holiday Hack Challenge, KringleCon, SANS, InfoSec, CTFs, CyberSecurity, Cyber Security

Id: NKHF5VZmCig

Length: 15min 53sec (953 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 09 2020