Security sites to bookmark: blog.didierstevens.com and rootshell.be

Belgium: Waffles... and security

The professional activities that we undertake within our company, be it our own shop or our employer, can, and should, benefit from all our other security related activities. The two Security Sites I recommend to visit confirm this. Both are written by well known names in the European Information Security community: The Belgians Didier Stevens and Xavier Mertens.

As securityandrisk, Didier Stevens created his blog blog.didierstevens.com in 2006. Since then, he regularly publishes very practical and technical security articles. Didier pays special attention to network security. The quality of the blog invites you to visit his own business' site didierstevenslabs.com, especially dedicated to pdf and "shellcode" analysis.  His company site is accessible from blog.didierstevens.com.

Xavier Mertens, with his unique "Belgian balloon fish" avatar, present both in his twitter account and blog, is the author of rootshell.be. On the Internet since 2003, rootshell.be publishes, together with his presented papers, very detailed summaries of the security conferences he attends. This is an opportunity to know what happened and what was said there. As in the case of Didier,  rootshell.be also links to truesec.be, his own security company, specialized in log management and security testing.

Both authors discuss security issues that are useful to our everyday job. From the pages of their blogs, they both link to some security tools (both Didier and Xavier). Didier proposes his own Microsoft Windows process-related utilities and Xavier introduces evasion tools such as "PingTunnel" and "Dns2tcp".

Information security is still a working field in which many breakthroughs, ideas and new developments come from "informal" channels such as blogs and security conferences rather than through formal academic degrees and scientific journals in the field. These two sites confirm this trend.

In short, the visit of these two personal sites from well-known Belgian security experts gives us ideas for our professional life while they nicely introduce the security companies they have created.

You can also read this post in Spanish here.

Happy Belgian security reading!

Making bridges