Hi all,

First of all Happy New Years! 2009 was an eventful year for the security community and no doubt 2010 will be only more of the same.

Now that I am back from my trip to the Chaos Computer Club's 26C3 Congress, I'd like to take the opportunity of introducing myself and welcoming you to our nascent Meetup group of computer security and forensics professionals (and those who would like to be). When I proposed the idea to Jamie Levy, our co-organizer, a few months ago, I didn't expect that so many people would sign up so quickly without any real advertising.

First of all myself: I am a native New Yorker, but have spent most of my life in Germany and Switzerland. I started in computer security when I co-founded the Virus Test Center at the university of Hamburg with Prof. Dr. Brunnstein back in 1988. I already did reverse engineering at the time, so I thought Malware would be an interesting application of my skills. Later I founded my own company, which through a series of acquisitions is now a part of McAfee, Inc, where we mainly did digital forensics and malware defense for large German corporations. However, I left it at joined IBM Research (Yorktown Heights, NY) to work on the Digital Immune System back in 1996 and later moved to IBM Zurich Research Lab. Over time, I found myself doing more research in the field of compliance and led a research project to create a new security model called Data Centric Security, with the aim of making compliancy easier to implement. For various reasons, I needed to leave Switzerland and decided to try my hand at teaching at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, also because that subject matter was closer to my core interests. That didn't work out as well as I hoped and I joined Trend Micro as a Senior Threat Researcher in 2008, where I still am.

Jamie Levy, our co-organizer, can introduce herself :-)

About the group: My intention with this group is to bring together us computer security professionals on a regular basis. So much of what we do is based on interpersonal trust and meeting face-to-face is therefore important. After co-organizing another Meetup in our area for a while, I feel that this format seems to work pretty well. I hope to bring in interesting speakers on roughly a monthly basis, but while these talks will serve as a focus for the meetup, the true intension is to encourage people to socialize, so a significant part of the meetup will be dedicated to this. This is the rough format I have in mind, but we'll see how well it goes and adapt as we go along:

1. Meetup starts, usually at 6:30pm. I'm going to get Pizza for the first meetup on my own cost, but we'll have to see how we can manage this in the future. The first 30 minutes will therefor be eating and chatting.

2. 'Formal' part starts around 7pm. We'll all quickly introduce ourselves and this would be a good time for any announcements.

3. The talk should take no more than 1 hour. 

4. Wrap up with 30 minutes of socializing. It can't get too late as I need to head out to Westchester.

How you can help: First of all, thanks for joining. You can easily help by spreading the word to other people you feel would be interested. Also and VERY IMPORTANT, we need locations. As you may have noticed, we don't have a location for the first meeting, but I am working on that. However, coming up with locations is always a challenge in the other meetup I help organize and it won't be different for us. So, please please, let me and Jamie know if you know of a location we can use. We could also use sponsors. There is a little cost overhead involved with organizing the Meetup and this may be an opportunity for a NYC based company to get some attention. 

I think we're going to have a great year and I can't wait to see you at the first meetup later this month!

Cheers, Morton

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... Morton Swimmer ... Senior Threat Researcher/Trend Micro ... Technical Editor/Virus Bulletin ... [address removed] ... http://www.linked... ... http://twitter.co... ... http://www.flickr... ...