As early as 1996, I created a mail list called InfoSec News (ISN) which initially was to share news about the industry. At the time, there were no online news sites covering the topic with any regularity and most were hobbies at best. So the original list had many articles that I had typed in by hand from print InfoSec magazines. The list has mostly faded into obscurity; so much so that trying to Google for information on the early days was a challenge. Before that little piece of history is lost I wanted to document it to some degree or another for posterity. Unfortunately, some of this will be from my sketchy memory so if you have more accurate information and/or citations, please leave a comment! I will update the blog accordingly and give credit.
In the early days the mail list was run off Majordomo on a personal system, either lemming.com or sekurity.org, then moved to RepSec, then hosted by Security Focus, then moved attrition.org, and found a final resting place at InfoSecNews.org. Despite what is likely over 25 years of the list running, it was only managed by me initially and then I handed it off to William Knowles on DATE.
List Timeline
This is where today, as an aspiring amateur anthropologist and definite vulnerability historian, I kick myself for having incomplete records of the mail list history. Part of losing the early days was due to having hard drives die, no modern backup solutions like we enjoy today, and information spread out on one too many systems. So piecing it all together today is part of the fun game of mail list history forensics.
| Date | Event |
| 1996 | Start of ISN mail list? |
| 1998-06-04 | Hosted on security.org using Majordomo |
| 1999 | Hosted on repsec.com (Repent Security Inc) |
| 1999-04-28 | Earliest post online I can find (ref) |
| 1999-08 | Hosted on Security-focus.com (possibly earlier) |
| 1999-09-10 | Seclists.org begins archiving the list |
| 2000-01 | William Knowles takes over sometime in Jan or Feb |
| 2001-05-15 | Security Focus changes to ezlm software (see below) |
| 2001-07-26 | List moves to attrition.org (ref) |
| 2006-07-07 | List moves to infosecnews.org (ref) |
| 2016-02-06 | Unannounced start of a year and a half sabbatical with no posts (ref) |
| 2018-10-03 | “Soft Reboot”, return of the list (ref) |
| 2020-08-13 | Last post to list as of this blog post (ref) |
Once again using SecLists’s archives, which I know to be incomplete, it still gives a general overall feel for how busy the list was. The busiest year was 2002 with a total of 1,781 posts with the least busy being 2016 at 31 posts, the year of Knowles’ sabbatical. From late September until the list went quiet in August, 2020, there were at least 21,602 posts.This doesn’t include up to three years of posts before that.
Conclusion
Running a mail list like that in the early years was certainly a challenge. Buying the early print magazines on security, reading, then typing in article snippets was time consuming and costly. But at the time there really was no other news feed on the topic.
I’d like to thank everyone who posted to the list, give a big shout out to Fyodor for taking my local archives and importing to SecLists for preservation, and the biggest thanks to William Knowles for taking over the list and keeping it going for a long, long time.
Offline Reference – Headers
Below are snippets from my offline archive of the list, as a form of reference.
Date: Tue, 15 May 2001 01:15:13 -0500 (CDT)
From: InfoSec News <isn@c4i.org>
To: isn@securityfocus.com
Subject: [ISN] Administrivia: Move to EZMLM
Forwarded by: Elias Levy <aleph1@securityfocus.com>
Earliest offline post, same date as mentioned in table but this post does not appear on SecLists.
Date: Sat, 1 May 1999 14:26:43 -0600 (MDT)
From: cult hero <jericho@dimensional.com>
To: InfoSec News <isn@repsec.com>
Subject: [ISN] Taiwan virus suspect free on lack of victims
Leave a Reply