It’s been slightly more than 10 years that I have spent in the information security domain. Information Security is mostly assumed to be a very small and tightly connected community. However in these 10 years I have learned there are many persona’s active in the current industry, some very vocal, some very active yet not socially present at all. I have also always wondered how the information security industry started and proliferated in India.
Being from a non computer science background also made me cautious that I might be missing out a lot of things coz I was not formally educated in such tradecraft. the OSINT’er in me would quietly lookup people to understand am I the only one outsider or more like me exist. I was always surprised to find its a healthy mix of formally educated and self educated group. It also has been eye opening to see how different individuals have taken the art of information security and made it their own in unique ways. Whenever I will look at how someone has progressed, it would make me feel that there is more that can be done. It’s not imposter syndrome rather an encouragement that someone has done more and there is a whole lot more that can be done.
This thought has kept resurfacing many times and I kept doing the exercise over and over. This year I thought I would do something to make this an easy task for myself, but also make the data available for others.
Introducing Hacking Archives of India: https://hackingarchivesofindia.com
This is a website that I am working on in my free time nowadays. Where I started collecting public knowledge sharing activities by different Indian individuals. I have started with gathering conference presence as the first point of collection as it was easy to vet and was a good start point. I have a roadmap planned out and detailed https://hackingarchivesofindia.com/roadmap/.
As of today I have got “403 entries for 224 unique individuals”.
I am outlining each Individual with a profile link to their social handles and websites (if any) and I have also provided a full timeline of events. As of today I have captured the data from following events :
International conferences: Blackhat Events, HitbSecConf events, Defcon maintrack talks
Indian Conferences : SecurityByte, Clubhack.
I am working on nullcon and c0c0n data sets as my next set and then will start looking at more conferences inside India and outside. Going forward besides conference talks and tool demos. I am also Interested in collecting a list of tools developed by Indians and books written by Indians.
This has been an interesting journey so far and I hope to continue exploring and expand the dataset. My earlier findings have reaffirmed a lot due to the data I have gathered so far. And I am thinking of many other ways in which this dataset could be useful for people, especially for those who are joining in the industry as a fresher.
I would also like to thank Shreya and Sheeraz for helping me with the data collection.
I will not waste more time of everyone on this blog post rather I would encourage everyone to have a look at the dataset @ https://hackingarchivesofindia.com
