Keeping up to date with Tech, Cloud and Security info

| Dec 30, 2022
Keeping up to date with Tech, Cloud and Security info

Cover Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash

Introduction

In this post, I’m going to talk about something that comes up often enough that its probably worth a post now!

I’m often asked how I manage to keep up with whats going in tech in general, and Cloud and Information Security/CyberSecurity in particular.

So how do you keep up with what’s new?

First, lets dispel the myth that you can keep up - you can’t!

You may think that’s a bit of a flippant dismissal but in my opinion, unless you have a photographic memory, and are able to spend a huge amount of your day consuming news, you simply can’t - the rate of change is too high.

Okay, but then how do you do the best you can to be aware of whats new?

For me, the key is to curate your own news feed from your preferred list of sources, and for your preferred topics.

When there is so much news that you could read, you realise that information consumption is kind of like drinking.

No seriously, go with me on this…

If you try to drink from a waterfall (or a fire hydrant) you will drown!

So you choose a subset of sources so the flow is such that you can drink from it without drowning.

So, that’s quantity, but what about quality?

If you are going to be selective about how many sources and what topics, you also need to be mindful that you are feeding yourself with good quality information.

You wouldn’t want to drink from a poisoned well, right?

Selecting sources

I use a variety of sources:

  1. Personal Blogs
  2. Vendor Blogs
  3. News Sites
  4. Social Media (following accounts that have interesting, valuable things to say about the topics you are interested in).

In that way you learn a lot more than even what some blogs cover - especially in regards to threat intelligence.

Though I don’t work in SecOps or a red team type of role - as a security engineer it’s useful to know what attack vectors are out there in active use so that it’s front of mind when building and securing solutions.

Okay but surely you aren’t checking all of these sources manually?

Indeed not. For many years now I’ve been a big fan of RSS feeds.

For me this started with Google Reader and when they closed that service down, as Google are prone to doing, I switched to the Feedly service that sprung up and to which many Google Reader users flocked to in their droves.

So I create Folders/Sections in my Feedly feeds by topic (News, F1, Tech, Cloud etc) and add feeds to each section that I find useful and informative.

One of the great features of Feedly is that as well as adding RSS feeds of news websites and blogs that support it, you can also add feeds of Twitter accounts (for a long time I had one for Kevin Beaumont amongst others) and each post they make comes up as a new feed entry just as would be the case for a new blog article or news story. You don’t even need a Twitter account if their profile is Public (the default) and if you only want to read, not interact.

With the move to Mastodon, you can do the same there. In addition, you can also follow hashtags.

Where RSS helps via an RSS feed reader is that it automatically checks for new items for each feed you subscribe to, and it also knows what you’ve already read so won’t serve them up to you again (though you can see items you’ve already read if you need to).

Okay so what are you favoured sources?

At the time of writing, my current feeds (sanitized to remove some non tech ones) are as below (exported from Feedly as an OPML file that you can import into Feedly or other compatible tools).

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<opml version="1.0">
    <head>
        <title>Cirrius subscriptions in feedly Cloud</title>
    </head>
    <body>
        <outline text="Security" title="Security">
            <outline type="rss" text="Graham Cluley" title="Graham Cluley" xmlUrl="http://feeds.feedburner.com/GrahamCluleysBlog" htmlUrl="https://grahamcluley.com"/>
            <outline type="rss" text="Schneier on Security" title="Schneier on Security" xmlUrl="http://www.schneier.com/blog/index.rdf" htmlUrl="https://www.schneier.com"/>
            <outline type="rss" text="Scott Helme" title="Scott Helme" xmlUrl="https://scotthelme.co.uk/feed/" htmlUrl="https://scotthelme.co.uk/"/>
            <outline type="rss" text="Darknet" title="Darknet" xmlUrl="http://feeds.feedburner.com/darknethackers" htmlUrl="https://www.darknet.org.uk"/>
            <outline type="rss" text="SANS Internet Storm Center, InfoCON: green" title="SANS Internet Storm Center, InfoCON: green" xmlUrl="http://iscxml.sans.org/rssfeed.xml" htmlUrl="https://isc.sans.edu"/>
            <outline type="rss" text="Dark Reading" title="Dark Reading" xmlUrl="http://www.darkreading.com/rss_simple.asp?f_n=644&amp;f_ln=Attacks/Breaches" htmlUrl="https://www.darkreading.com"/>
            <outline type="rss" text="Blog - NetSPI" title="Blog - NetSPI" xmlUrl="http://www.netspi.com/blog/feed/" htmlUrl="https://www.netspi.com/blog/"/>
            <outline type="rss" text="Microsoft Security Response Center" title="Microsoft Security Response Center" xmlUrl="http://blogs.technet.com/msrc/rss.xml" htmlUrl="https://msrc-blog.microsoft.com"/>
            <outline type="rss" text="Trend Micro Research, News and Perspectives" title="Trend Micro Research, News and Perspectives" xmlUrl="http://feeds.trendmicro.com/TrendMicroSimplySecurity" htmlUrl="http://feed.informer.com/digests/G5HRN3DTV4/feeder"/>
            <outline type="rss" text="Troy Hunt's Blog" title="Troy Hunt's Blog" xmlUrl="http://feeds.feedburner.com/TroyHunt" htmlUrl="https://www.troyhunt.com/"/>
            <outline type="rss" text="Google Online Security Blog" title="Google Online Security Blog" xmlUrl="http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com/atom.xml" htmlUrl="http://security.googleblog.com/"/>
            <outline type="rss" text="Packet Storm Security" title="Packet Storm Security" xmlUrl="http://packetstormsecurity.org/headlines.xml" htmlUrl="https://packetstormsecurity.com/"/>
            <outline type="rss" text="NCSC Guidance Feed" title="NCSC Guidance Feed" xmlUrl="https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/feeds/guidance.xml" htmlUrl="https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/api/1/services/v1/guidance-rss-feed.xml"/>
            <outline type="rss" text="Naked Security" title="Naked Security" xmlUrl="http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/feed/" htmlUrl="https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com"/>
            <outline type="rss" text="NCSC Blog Feed" title="NCSC Blog Feed" xmlUrl="https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/blogs-feed.xml" htmlUrl="https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/api/1/services/v1/blog-post-rss-feed.xml"/>
            <outline type="rss" text="Posts By SpecterOps Team Members - Medium" title="Posts By SpecterOps Team Members - Medium" xmlUrl="https://posts.specterops.io/feed" htmlUrl="https://posts.specterops.io?source=rss----f05f8696e3cc---4"/>
            <outline type="rss" text="The Hacker News | #1 Trusted Cybersecurity News Site" title="The Hacker News | #1 Trusted Cybersecurity News Site" xmlUrl="http://www.blogger.com/feeds/4802841478634147276/posts/default" htmlUrl="http://thehackernews.com/"/>
            <outline type="rss" text="NCSC Report Feed" title="NCSC Report Feed" xmlUrl="https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/feeds/reports.xml" htmlUrl="https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/api/1/services/v1/report-rss-feed.xml"/>
            <outline type="rss" text="Project Zero" title="Project Zero" xmlUrl="http://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default" htmlUrl="https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/"/>
            <outline type="rss" text="The Register – Security" title="The Register – Security" xmlUrl="http://www.theregister.co.uk/security/headlines.atom" htmlUrl="https://www.theregister.com/security/"/>
            <outline type="rss" text="Have I Been Pwned latest breaches" title="Have I Been Pwned latest breaches" xmlUrl="http://feeds.feedburner.com/HaveIBeenPwnedLatestBreaches" htmlUrl="https://haveibeenpwned.com/"/>
            <outline type="rss" text="Unit 42" title="Unit 42" xmlUrl="http://feeds.feedburner.com/Unit42" htmlUrl="https://unit42.paloaltonetworks.com"/>
            <outline type="rss" text="Dark Reading" title="Dark Reading" xmlUrl="http://www.darkreading.com/rss/all.xml" htmlUrl="https://www.darkreading.com"/>
        </outline>
        <outline text="Tech" title="Tech">
            <outline type="rss" text="The GitHub Blog" title="The GitHub Blog" xmlUrl="https://github.com/blog/all.atom" htmlUrl="https://github.blog/"/>
            <outline type="rss" text="Scott Hanselman's Blog" title="Scott Hanselman's Blog" xmlUrl="http://feeds.feedburner.com/ScottHanselman" htmlUrl="https://www.hanselman.com/blog/"/>
            <outline type="rss" text="The Register" title="The Register" xmlUrl="http://www.theregister.co.uk/headlines.atom" htmlUrl="https://www.theregister.com/"/>
            <outline type="rss" text="CirriusTech | Serious About Tech" title="CirriusTech | Serious About Tech" xmlUrl="https://www.cirriustech.co.uk/index.xml" htmlUrl="https://www.cirriustech.co.uk/"/>
            <outline type="rss" text="The Official Google Blog" title="The Official Google Blog" xmlUrl="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default" htmlUrl="https://blog.google/"/>
            <outline type="rss" text="BleepingComputer" title="BleepingComputer" xmlUrl="http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/feed/" htmlUrl="https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/"/>
        </outline>
        <outline text="Cloud" title="Cloud">
            <outline type="rss" text="Google Cloud Platform Blog" title="Google Cloud Platform Blog" xmlUrl="http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/atom.xml" htmlUrl="http://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/"/>
            <outline type="rss" text="Thomas Thornton" title="Thomas Thornton" xmlUrl="https://thomasthornton.cloud/feed/" htmlUrl="https://thomasthornton.cloud"/>
            <outline type="rss" text="Docker" title="Docker" xmlUrl="http://blog.docker.io/feed/" htmlUrl="https://www.docker.com"/>
            <outline type="rss" text="Microsoft Azure Blog" title="Microsoft Azure Blog" xmlUrl="http://azure.microsoft.com/blog/feed/" htmlUrl="http://azure.microsoft.com/blog/"/>
            <outline type="rss" text="Azure Status" title="Azure Status" xmlUrl="http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/status/feed/" htmlUrl="https://status.azure.com/en-us/status/"/>
            <outline type="rss" text="Azure service updates" title="Azure service updates" xmlUrl="http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/updates/feed/" htmlUrl="http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/updates/"/>
            <outline type="rss" text="The Cloudflare Blog" title="The Cloudflare Blog" xmlUrl="http://blog.cloudflare.com/rss.xml" htmlUrl="https://blog.cloudflare.com/"/>
            <outline type="rss" text="Azure Tips and Tricks" title="Azure Tips and Tricks" xmlUrl="https://microsoft.github.io/AzureTipsAndTricks/rss.xml" htmlUrl="https://microsoft.github.io/AzureTipsAndTricks"/>
            <outline type="rss" text="Pixel Robots." title="Pixel Robots." xmlUrl="https://pixelrobots.co.uk/feed/" htmlUrl="https://pixelrobots.co.uk/"/>
            <outline type="rss" text="My Feed Title" title="My Feed Title" xmlUrl="http://azurestack.tips/en/blog.rss" htmlUrl="https://azurestack.tips/en"/>
            <outline type="rss" text="Azure Greg" title="Azure Greg" xmlUrl="http://gregorsuttie.com/feed/" htmlUrl="https://gregorsuttie.com"/>
        </outline>
    </body>
</opml>

Summary

As ever, thanks for reading and feel free to leave comments down below!

If you like what I do and appreciate the time and effort and expense that goes into my content you can always Buy Me a Coffee at ko-fi.com

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