Hello everyone!
I hope that 2015 has found you well, happy and prospering professionally. 2014 was a good year for the Chapter, more than doubling our membership and adding to the Chapter coffers with valued sponsors such as Cisco, SSH.com and Indeed.com. We hosted six meetings on subjects ranging from cloud security to IPv6 and had a very successful membership drive at SDLC (thanks Tabitha and Louisa for working that!). At our year-end meeting, we held our biennial election where there was a passing of the guard from our Co-founder and President, Forrest Foster, to myself so Forrest could pursue career opportunities on the West Coast. Other elected Board members include Louisa Hoberman, elected as Vice President and Director of Operations, Dennis Sutherland as Treasurer and Tabitha Greiner as Director of Community Outreach and Sponsorships; all were reelected to two year terms. A Board newcomer, Jim Kaiser, was elected as Secretary. Bart Lauwers will continue to fulfill his duties as Director of Technical Operation and Membership Chair after being appointed last year by the Board. Congratulations to the new Board and a hearty thank you to all outgoing members. I look forward to leading the Chapter in 2015 and 2016 with you.
At year’s end, our chapter had $5,123.11 in the bank, having spent $1,700 and brought in $1,200 during the year. At our first Board meeting of 2015, we voted to set a schedule of Chapter meetings or 2nd Monday nights. We’ll plan on meeting alternate months with the option to schedule additional Monday night meetings, depending on the speaker availability. We believe this will make things a little more predictable and allow people to schedule them far ahead of time. One of our meetings will be Monday April 13, 7PM at the Indeed.com offices on 360 near 183 we will present Kevin Dunn of iSec Partners. Kevin will be speaking on “Breaking into a Company: Attacker Modeled Pen testing and Red Team Projects.” It sounds like it will be an interesting evening, and evites will be going out with additional details. Chapter meetings will be held on June 8th, August 10th, October 12th, with topics and speakers to be announced. The final meeting is our year-end party on December 14. We hope to present additional topics such as Privacy and the NSA, Cloud Security, IT governance, and other information security topics.
Check the website www.isc2-austin-chapter.org for updates, and we will also be sending the usual EventBrite invitations to all meetings. If you are not getting these invitations, please notify our membership chair, Bart Lauwers at blauwers@gmail.com so that he can update the membership rolls with your information. Or, if you are getting them in error, let us know and we will remove you. If you have an idea for an event or topic to be covered at a meeting or even better yet, a speaker to present, please let me know. We are always looking for interesting topics and speakers from our membership. Also, members are asked to attend at least 3 meetings a year if they wish to continue their free membership status. And with that, I’ll end the State of the Chapter address. Looking forward to seeing you at our meetings this year.
Sincerely,
Tony Howlett, CISSP, GSNA
President, (ISC)2 -Austin Chapter