#introduction #introductions #reintroduction #reintroductions
holy shit, I step out for dinner and theres /more/ of you following me. I gained nearly 200 followers in a single day.

As always, welcome to infosec.exchange.

I'm assuming if you found me, someone misguided you, or you are aware of the image macros and spam that rule my feed. I always aim for that SSS rating:

Suffering
Shitposting
Security news

My background is, of course, in cybersecurity. I have a bit over a decade of experience in infosec in general, with the vast majority of that spent on the blue team, and in private sector, but with a little bit of time on the red team in the intel community.

My specialization is network security monitoring. Some call it NIDS, some call it DPI, some call it IDS/IPS, a few call it NGFW and NGIPS to sound sophisticated, but I stare at pcaps, do pattern recognition, and write signatures or rules for Snort and Suricata to detect anomalous traffic that repeat unique patterns. That's my job in a nutshell.

IDS/IPS work requires a broad understanding of network protocols, and sometimes, some guesswork and a lot of sandbox runs when you're encountering C2 traffic to figure out the constants and variables.

I also wrote a book on creating virtual machine labs for learning IT and infosec concepts. I'm not gonna tell you to buy my shit, especially when you can get it for free if you really want it. Check out the other pinned toot for details.

In my spare time, I like to be a part of the life of my wife who is a first-grade teacher, and my two beautiful and very happy bassett hounds. I also play a lot of video games (I enjoy rogue-likes, rogue-lites, turn-based strategy, RPGs, and generally most indie titles), red a lot of manga, and watch a lot of anime (My favorite genre/trope is typically isekai. I love escapism, made rises to power, and seeing how creative storytellers get with the mechanics of the world that they just dropped someone into who is over or underpowered as hell). I grew up in MI, left, and came back. Its very likely I'll die here. I love this place, especially the northern parts of the state, and one day dream of owning land or maybe even a very modest vacation home somewhere in the north reaches. Maybe someday, but I digress.

I have a reputation for being a prolific shitposter, but generally that's because life is way too fucking short to take seriously. Some people got a laugh out of it, some didn't. If I'm too high volume, I apologize. I won't be offended if you unfollow, block, mute, whatever. You do what you have to.

In spite of all the noise, I'm somewhat enthusiastic about security and NSM (network security monitoring) in general, and happy to answer questions if i can, and if I can't try to point you to better sources of information.

That's enough about me. I'm gonna have you play a game. Playing this game is entirely optional, but I wanna know more about you. If you drop me a follow, or have dropped me a follow, please tell me why. Thanks.