Strategic Security is giving away four free seats (1 seat per month from April – July) to Hacking In Paradise – The Bahamas 2013.

This is a full package deal offer – so you’ll get airfare, lodging, and the training if you win.

To enter and be considered for one of the seats you’ll have to perform several activities.
You can do as many activities as you want everyday – good luck.

After you complete your tasks, send an email to joe(at)strategicsec(dot)com with publicly viewable links to the completed activities.

Here are the entry activities:

- Tweet about this giveaway (3 points)
- Follow @j0emccray on twitter (1 point)
- Follow @strategicsec on twitter (1 point)
- Friend j0emccray on facebook [facebook.com/j0emccray] (1 point)
- Add gplus.to/j0emccray to one of your circles on Google+ (1 point)
- Like this page on facebook (1 point)
- +1 Hacking in Paradise page on Google+ (1 point)
- Blog about this class (3 points)
- Google+ post about this class (3 points)
- Follow @ITSecPros on twitter (5 points)
- +1 IT Security Professionals page on Google+ (1 point)

a Rafflecopter giveaway

For the past few months the rookies and I have been working on the new website IT Security Professionals.

What’s this place all about?

Simple – it’s a social networking and resource website for IT Security Professionals. Think – LinkedIn, Facebook, Monster.com, and Wikipedia all wrapped up in one website just for IT Security People.

What separates this website from anywhere else on the web?

The key differentiators for this website are:

1. Spam-Free
2. Vendor-Free
3. Content and Discussion driven

There were several goals that this site needed to accomplish, and I’m really hoping that we are moving in the right direction so we can achieve them. Here is the rundown:

R00kie group goals:

• Provide us with a project management solution so we could task r00kies with projects and track the status of those projects.

• Provide us with the ability for r00kies to collaborate on documents
• Provide us with a mechanism to allow r00kies to show what their contributions to the r00kie program have been

IT Security Community Goals

• Provide us with a mechanism to give back to the IT Security Community
• Provide the IT Security Community with a vehicle to learn and keep up with the industry

Check out the site, and let us know what you think

I really hope that you check out the website and let us know what you think. I know it will take some time, but I really think that we’re going to provide something of value to the community with this project.

http://it-security-professionals.com/

Joe

I didn’t want to do this, I tried not to let it get to this point, but I’m done – and as much as I care about keeping my personal issues to myself this is the straw that broke the camel’s back for me.

I’m putting this dirty laundry out 1 time, and one time only. I absolutely will not speak on this subject ever again after this post. In my last blog post I responded to this Plagarism accusation from Saumil Shah. I emailed every single student in the class, made them aware of the situation – apologized, and offered refunds to anyone that felt slighted in any way. For the nearly 180 students that are taking courses with me this month I’ve given 12 refunds and I’ll happily give a refund to any other student that requests it.

After that I tried to go on about my business, but this is getting to the point of sheer stupidity.

Saumil, for 2 years even though very mention of your name made my skin crawl I still praised you publicly, recommended you publicly (YES, EVEN IN THE COURSEWARE YOU SAY I STOLE FROM YOU  – said that I learned this from you and I’d recommend that people take your classes).

Let’s get down to brass tacks here…

The truth is that Saumil and I have a financial dispute over a class that he taught with my company and a partner training company that I often work with nearly two years ago. The class wasn’t selling well so I lowered the price (literally cut the price in half) to get some sales. The company that hosted the training paid Saumil $9,000 when the class only grossed a little over 20K. Saumil wanted me to pay him 17,000. In total I paid him 15K when my cut was only 6K. So basically I lost 11K on the class and Saumil still wants the remaining 2K. And no there was no contract between us – it was a gentlemen’s agreement done without even a handshake.

When I was in the class I was so appreciative of him helping me learn the subject that I offered to rewrite my notes from his class, update the attack scripts and port them to python for him which was something he said he wanted to do in the future, and fully document lab manuals with step-by-step walkthroughs for each lab.  I told him that he could have ALL of this for free and I would be happy to do it as it would help me learn the material better. I honestly had planned to work on future classes with him where he would teach the exploit development and I would teach the network/web attacks. I was excited about the potential and he was too.

When it came time to settle up I paid him more money than I took in for the class (more than double what I took in – $6,000 was all I made and he wanted $17,000 – nearly triple what I made).  I was already in financial peril at the time because 3 customers had not paid for their penetration tests, and 1 customer had not paid me for a class so I was owed nearly $100,000 dollars. I was drowning financially so I paid him late, but even with paying him late I was still giving him money when I didn’t have it to give.

I got evicted from my home and even then I was still trying to pay Saumil for a class that I lost money on, a few months later I taught a class in Norway at HackCON  and had my point of contact for the event give Saumil all of the money from the event when I had no home to live in.

At this point I was in deep financial peril at the time and felt like Saumil was being an asshole to me. What kind of human I kept thinking to myself would be this way to me when I was homeless.

At this point I now fully hated his guts – nothing would satisfy me more than punching him in the mouth in front of god and country. I only had a few thousand dollars left to pay at this point, and the only reason that I was going to pay it was because I didn’t want him to go to security conferences and tell people in the IT Security community that I didn’t pay my bills. I figured it would destroy my ability to speak at conferences, run classes, and basically ruin me.

At that point Saumil’s business partner Hiren Shah began calling our mutual acquaintances, and my contractors asking each of that what my financial situation was. How much money I had made on recent penetration tests, courses, had they been paid from me recently, and more.

This put me through the roof!!!!!!!!!

Here I am taking money out my family’s mouth, still don’t have a place to live, and struggling to pay Saumil just so I can keep my private life out of the security industry and now here we go. Too late for that.

At this point I didn’t care anymore, I was so angry with him for being such a cowardly bitch that I couldn’t stand it. I swore that the next time I see him there was gonna be some furniture moving. Yes ChrisJohnRiley THIS IS THE NEW BLACK I was 2 seconds away from whooping  Saumil’s ass. I was ready to put my foot so far up his ass that his breath would smell like shoe polish!

I told him explicitly (yes that means I dropped a lot of F-Bombs) how I felt, and that I’m not paying him the remaining money because he and Hiren are both some bitches.  After that – all of these notes I rewrote, scripts I ported from perl to python, lab manuals that I wrote – for him as a gift to show my appreciation that he mentions in his blog post, and yes his precious virtual machines – I used them in classes, webinars, and workshops I taught. I did it to spite him. I was pissed at him – immature I realize – but at least it’s the truth. I might as well try to make my money back after all of this mess.

Saumil and anybody else for that matter – you can write whatever you want about me. You can put me on what ever page you want, talk about me on twitter, but at the end of the day Saumil can have a hot steamy cup of FUCK YOU! At this point I flat out don’t care how many people you tell, how many people talk about this on twitter. I hope that every single human being on this earth learns how much of a whining wimpy little bitch you are, and knows that I can’t stand you and I would rather eat hot shit before I’d even acknowledge that you are a fucking human being let alone speak to you.

No I’m not paying you, and I sincerely feel bad for every single incident of a people loosing respect for me with regard to this issue, I know that I will never do it again because there is no HUMAN being that would ever be the way that he was to me, but I refuse to continue to talk to people like you are a good person when I know you are not.

So Saumil, and Hiren – I just want you to know what I think of you personally, and professionally.

From the bottom of my heart…

FUCK YOU!

Joe

Hello everyone, I want to address an issue. Saumil Shah, of Exploit Labs has made a post on his blog that I feel I need to address:

http://blog.exploitlab.net/2013/02/defending-our-work.html

Summary:

I used the virtual machines from the class that I was in 2 years ago. I did it out of convenience. The virtual machines are built with software that is freely available on the Internet. There is no intellectual property of his that was stolen.

Saumil and I have had disagreements in the past and quite frankly the differences between us have still not been resolved. We are civil, but that is about the end of it. I emailed Saumil yesterday and let him know the following:

Even though we are not on good terms I apologize for using his virtual machines and will create new ones for my upcoming classes.

1. Even though we have personal issues I recommended him in my webinars and in this very course as a good person to learn from.
2. The screenshot of debugger commands that he references in his blog post was never given out to students. And honestly – it’s just commands not intellectual property. It’s the same as handing out a GDB cheatsheet for reference.

To both Saumil and the entire IT Security community

I apologize for misrepresenting the courseware. I looked at it as all of the software on the virtual machines that he gives away is freely available on the internet and it was helping me get the courseware done quickly by providing a working set of attack target virtual machines. It was never intended to be considered giving away his courseware. I will correct this immediately and I will have new virtual machines for my future classes.

I sent a formal apology for Peter Van Eeckhoutte (https://twitter.com/corelanc0d3r), someone I truly respect for his technical ability and his friendship because someone contacted asking if this blog post was  about him. I can assure you that Peter has the utmost of integrity, honor, and professionalism. He has absolutely nothing to do with all of this.

If any student of mine in this course or anything other course I’m currently teaching would like a refund – feel free to ask. My integrity is important to me, and any student or client of mine that feels that my integrity is not at the proper level I will gladly refund their money.

Joe

Strategic Security is giving away three (3) free seats to Hacking In Paradise – The Bahamas 2012.
If you complete all of the activities, you will receive 2 additional bonus points on
top of what you already accumulated (you can do as many activities as you want everyday – good luck).

After you complete your tasks, send an email to joe(at)strategicsec(dot)com with
publicly viewable links to the completed activities.

Here are the entry activities:

- Tweet about this giveaway (3 points)
- Follow @j0emccray on twitter (1 point)
- Follow @strategicsec on twitter (1 point)
- Friend j0emccray on facebook [facebook.com/j0emccray] (1 point)
- Add gplus.to/j0emccray to one of your circles on Google+ (1 point)
- Like this page on facebook (1 point)
- +1 this Hacking in Paradise page on Google+ (1 point)
- Blog about this class (3 points)
- Google+ post about this class (3 points)
-
a Rafflecopter giveaway