About

At the moment, EyeIS is being born. I’m still not sure what she’ll be when I’m done, but I’m hoping it’s a good thing. My name is Brad. I’m a late 30s IT grunt with close to 15 years IT experience and a Masters degree in English Literature. Go figure.

I’ve worked for a software development company, where I cut my teeth, then moved to a decent sized hospital, where I got experience working with pretty much anything that had a network connection at either end of it. This included a lot of exposure to security; user and server administration, firewall administration and monitoring, IDS and incident response, wireless, and more. I’m presently a network security architect for a large organization.

I recently completed the SANS GIAC Incident Handling silver certification with honors and am churning away on paper ideas for the gold certification. Computer security is what I love to do. Whether it’s chasing down an infection, attempting to analyze malware, learning about the tactics employed, I find it all to be a pleasant rush sometimes. But it’s also very frustrating. The odds are against me and my ilk, the tools aren’t as good as they could and should be, and every minute we spend compensating for these inadequacies adds risk to our environment.

Which is how I got here. The idea has raced through my head, mutating each lap. My initial motivation was selfish. The knowledge and skills I have can help someone who may not have recourse and if I could make a little money doing so then we both win. The other reason is I’m like a paranoid neighbor. The more machines I keep from getting infected and acting malicious the less there are out there to make my job harder.

The big problem with doing it all for money is the time. I have a beautiful wife and daughter and they actually like to see me and I them. Consultations and implementations and malware recovery are sometimes tedious and time consuming and I’m not 100% prepared to make that commitment. So if you’re looking for my services, feel free to drop me an e-mail, but I can’t guarantee my availability.

But what I can do is try to lay the foundation for a home. To provide direction, guidance, resources, assistance to small businesses in an attempt to help them protect themselves. I hope to foster a community here of small businesses, who recognize the need for better security but lack the knowledge and time to educate themselves, and IT security professionals, who like me realize the dangers of an unprotected network and pc.

The goal is lofty and there is much content to coordinate, but I’m working on it. I hope to enlist some assistance if things get rolling, as I would like this to be as much community effort as individual. I’m also working on a few presentations, which I hope to use to educate small and medium business owners in my area and provide some exposure to this site, security and (cheap or free) solutions.

So welcome to EyeIS. Feel free to register if you’re not a bot.