Journalising, Journalism and Blogging…Restrictions on Posting

Posted on July 5th, 2009 by Drazen Drazic

I had a few comments sent to me about my last post. Some of the feedback; “It wasn’t inspirational”, “Its perspective wasn’t that unique”, “What was the point?” etc…. All fair points. My only response is that at times, I will use Beast or Buddha as my journal to write about things that aren’t necessarily meant to change anyone’s world or inspire, (though I did think the PCI post tried to do that)……just reflections on my day, week and thoughts going through my head about the good, and the bad in our industry, (though the latter motivates me far more to dissect and rant). I started Beast or Buddha for these reasons. Read on:

To a large degree, this blog, like many out there (I guess), are crippled in what I/we can post….or at least what I am willing/able to talk about. I’ve mentioned before that IT Security journalists do have a tough job, but I suppose IT Security bloggers to an extent can have it tougher at times. At least journalists can report just about everything that comes across their desks. We cannot – unless it’s about someone else’s work.

I can’t write about things relating directly to Securus Global’s day to day work (…at the time of the work, later without it falling into a generic topic, related in a generic way to other case-studies etc…..you get my drift)…the results of say our penetration testing work for example, the outcomes of research projects we’ve been engaged on etc etc……things far more interesting, newsworthy and many times worrying and scary as hell. I read about things in the press that months beforehand we’d been working on ourselves, discoveries we made that could never be reported, hacks of new technologies that now are world-wide “news”….. wow; iPhone vulnerabilities, ATMs again open to new attack vectors, etc etc (and we’re not the only ones who sit back reading and hearing about such news and thinking how much “news” it actually is not!).

So I suppose what I am trying to say is that the scope of topics for many posts are somewhat constricted….maybe more than “somewhat”… but there’s been enough room for me within those restrictions to bring out new ideas, present some recommendations and as always, upset a few people while I am doing it. I can’t guarantee it for every post. (……wonders how far down the chain this post itself is).