IOActive has recently begun to post a series of guest blogs. Our first post was an excellent contribution from Urban Jonson, who leads the Heavy Vehicle Cyber Security (HVCS) working group at NMFTA, focusing on emerging threats in intermodal transportation.

Our organization has embarked upon this series because we think it provides additional value to our readers. This is one more thing we’re doing to give back to the security community and help those starting out to gain a broader understanding of cybersecurity.

We have long prided ourselves on telling our clients what they need to know rather than what they want to hear. Likewise, our decades-long, original cybersecurity research program has delivered results that force the security community, industries, agencies, governments, and societies to re-evaluate their assumptions about cybersecurity risks and potential impacts.

Through this series of guest blog posts, we are going to expose readers to carefully curated concepts and perspectives presented by industry thought leaders who don’t happen to (currently) work for IOActive. We’re striving to collect a diverse, high-quality set of perspectives that help the security community think about what’s coming next and how to approach difficult problems in new ways.

These entries will be more focused on risks, emerging threats, potential business impacts, new approaches to solving problems, and other higher-level perspectives rather than our deeply technical blog entries from IOActive Labs.

Of course, in providing a platform for sharing diverse opinions, the opinions expressed in the guest blog posts are not necessarily those of IOActive.

Principles of Guest Blogging

We have lofty goals for our Guest Blog Series. To ensure we achieve the desired results we need to have some guiding principles for the series. It’s unfortunate, but necessary that we need to list some of these.

• No Paid Placement
  We will never post a blog in exchange for compensation. We’ll post things because they provide a valuable perspective and not because they are profitable.
• No Advertising
  IOActive will not sell advertising on our blog. We don’t want our readers to be assaulted by the worst use of browser technologies as they ponder a challenging thought.
• No Products; No Pitches
  No posts which focus on products or sales pitches will be allowed. Everyone gets enough of these already. Literally, a subset of the community is waiting to provide these.
• Original Content
  Content on the blog will be unique and not previously posted anywhere else. The content may be on a topic about which the author(s) have spoken or written before, but it cannot materially be a repost of prior work.
• Contributes to the Community
  The content of the post must positively contribute to the security community and hopefully the world, even if it challenges existing assumptions, approaches, or solutions. Ideally, the post will help readers contemplate what’s coming next and how to approach difficult problems in new ways through exposure to a diverse, high-quality perspective.

Hopefully, our readers will value these diverse, broad perspectives of our guest bloggers as much as we do.