Every month or three, I am reminded that people in the InfoSec industry don’t know me very well. They primarily know the Jericho that likes squirrels, runs attrition.org, and points out all the muck of the industry via the Errata project. To be sure, Errata is was a passion for a long time. The last 13 years have seen the project slowly make its way onto people’s radar, and the last two years have seen it gain the attention it deserved all along. It is definitely a part of who I am, and it is definitely a passion. However, it is not my longstanding focus and real passion.
The reason most don’t know is because the other side of me works on an endless, thankless aspect of our industry, that is ideally suited to those with OCPD. The very few of us that work on these projects have extensive discussions, often on a near daily basis, on the minutia of our projects. We may spend days or weeks discussing the most trivial detail never to be seen by the people using our offering. We pour through the most incomprehensible and worthless of reports, because it may contain valid information for our cause.
Why would we bother? First, it is our passion. We understand and appreciate what we do, why we do it, and we enjoy it regardless of the perversity. Second, we know who it benefits, usually without them knowing. In fact, our labor of love is one of several cornerstones of the industry. Entire families of technology rely on our information for correlation and cross-referencing. Many of them blindly rely on our aggregation of information; if we don’t publish via our channels, it basically doesn’t exist to many others. It is a deeply flawed model, but one that has been around for over a decade.
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