Kieran Jacobsen

Kieran Jacobsen

He/Him. Microsoft MVP and GitKraken Ambassador. 🌏 Poshsecurity.com. 🏳‍🌈 Gay. 🐱 Cat owner.

Welcome to Posh Security

I am thrilled to welcome everyone to my new website. This is something that I have been thinking about and working on for a number of months now, and am very glad to see it all finally coming together.

Why Posh Security?

My aim for this blog is, as it always was, to discuss what I am passionate about. My two biggest passions within the industry have always been automation with PowerShell and Security.

To all those that know me or have worked with me, it is pretty obvious that my first passion is PowerShell. I first starting working with PowerShell back in the code-name Monad days when the entire project was just a small concept from Jeffrey Snover (@jsnover); since then I have spent a considerable amount of time working with it, and have seen it develop and flourish into a truly amazing platform.

My second passion is the information security field. For a number of years I have been an avid follower of all movements within the information security industry, and I will admit that I spend a significant portion of my free time keeping up with the latest trends, tools and exploits. I have always been a big believer that security starts with those deploying and supporting systems, including system administrators, architects and developers. These employees should be highly skilled in various security concepts thus ensuring that they are actively working to ensure the security of an organisation and that an organisations security posture does not simply rest on the security and compliance teams.

I also believe that right now, there is a significant level of interest in PowerShell in the security community, and over the past few years, there have been a number of people who have had mode significant process in this field, including Matt Graeber (@mattifestation), Carlos Perez (@darkoperator), and Matt Johnson (@mwjcomputing). I was presented with my own opportunity to further the discussion on PowerShell and its security implications in 2014, when I was asked to present at  CrikeyCon. I was encouraged to do so by the always amazing Ash (@Ashd_au) and Wade Alcorn. I was then, and still am astounded by the feedback from that presentation, and my follow on appearance on Risky.Biz.

I have since been working on a number of project which I hope to present to the greater community over the coming months.

Why a new blog now?

There were so many reasons to start a new blog at this time.

I actually started down the path several months ago, however things prevented me from launching the site earlier. Whilst I feel that launching a new site on the 1st of January is a touch cliché, like a New Year's resolution, overall it feels like the best time to do so.

In early November, I joined an amazing team at Readify as a Technical Lead. My focus in this role is in supporting the infrastructure that allows all of our wonderful consultants and developers to achieve the best for Readify's customers. I am extremely excited at the amount of potential PowerShell development I have ahead of me, as well as working within the Microsoft Azure space. Special thanks goes out to  Tatham Oddie for his encouragement during the application process and over the past few weeks. Readify is an amazing place to work, and I recommend that people take a look at the  Readify Recruiting process, including the  Knock Knock challenge. Completing the challenge was extremely interesting and a lot of fun.

The new role also lead me to move to a new city! I have recently moved from hot and sunny Brisbane to beautiful Melbourne. With a new job, city and year, everything seemed right for a new website!

Moving Forward

You should have already started to see that my old site, aperturescience.su is now redirecting to poshsecurity.com, all of the content and addresses should have been migrated from the old to the new site.

I have setup @poshsecurity on Twitter with the aim to keep this to simply new post notifications and associated commentary. I will also post to this whenever a new GitHub repository is created or when I make major updates to my code. I wanted to have a Twitter address that people could follow and receive updates about the site and not have to also receive unwanted or unrelated messages/re-tweets. You can follow@poshsecurity  for site and code updates, for follow my personal account at @kjacobsen.

Speaking of code, I have created a GitHub organisation called PoshSecurity. This is where all the associated code for posts will go from now on. As code is improved and redeveloped, it will most likely be moved from my GitHub over to the PoshSecurity organisation. I will leave some personal repositories directly under my account.

One minor improvement is that I am planning on switching from code comments hosting with PasteBin to using Gists. Whilst they pretty much provide like-for-like functionality, the ability to clone Gists, leave comments and also maintain reversion history, makes them more useful.

Another change is that I have decided to make use of Disqus for comments. I know that the platform can be a pain, however there are some really neat things it can do. I feel that it might encourage more discussion, whilst discouraging some of the spam I have previously had to manage.

I will look at Tumblr/Facebook pages/Google+ down the track, but I think for now, this is enough to get started. In the future I am going to also look at putting up video guides on YouTube etc.

A very big thanks goes out to my Partner, Daniel and his sister Eileen. The two have greatly assisted in the development of the new site including the name, themes, layout and so much more. I highly recommend that people check out Eileen’s site, The Food Avenue, where she writes about food and fashion.

Once again, I would like to welcome everyone to the new site. I hope that people enjoy everything that I have planned for the future on this site. I welcome people to provide feedback on what they would like to see on this site. Leave a comment down below or use the Contact page.

Posh-CloudFlare managing CloudFlare using PowerShell

Tips For Managing Microsoft SQL 2012 Always On Availability Groups