I had an interesting follow up question to the most recent Exploring Information Security podcast, how to join the infosec community. Here’s the question:

Tyler Neeriemer:

Any advice for those of us in incredibly rural areas. Are there active online communities you can recommend?

This a great question, because I imagine there are a lot of people in a similar situation. My response was to join CitySec meetups remotely. Both MiSec and ColaSec stream and record the talks that they have. They would both love people to get involved online. Those are two groups that I know do this, there may be others (please hit me up if there are others).

I just started GamerSec, which is an infosec user group for those interested in video games. You can contact me directly to get added (my Twitter DMs are open or email, timothy.deblock[@]gmail[.]com). Again, there may be other online specific groups.

I also asked Micah for his input and he recommended checking meetup.com. If there’s nothing there you can get involved via listservs or slack channels. I am part of the OWASP, security metrics, ColaSec and GamerSec listservs. These are usually Google Groups that people with the same interest members can join to discuss an infosec topic. Slack is more of a chat channel (AKA IRC). I’m part of three slack channels: DevelopSec, MiSec, and ColaSec. I know there is also a channel for OSINT and Network Security and many others.

My final bit of advice is to start your own CitySec. You only need two people to start one. I've done a two-part podcast series on this topic. I would love to hear other suggestions.

This blog post first appeared on Exploring Information Security.