Who are the notable bloggers in the RE community, and how can we get them involved?

Question

We have established a repository having some excellent questions. Its now time to get the word out about RE.

There are many people in the online world who manage very active and productive blogs. These individuals have a lot of referral power.

If you're a blogger, or if you know a blogger, who may be interested in picking one of our most interesting questions, blogging about the topic, and then referring the readers to our site, please mention them below.

Also, share any ideas you may have about how to get them interested in the site (if they aren't already!)

Answer 1

I think most of the really big blogs in our industry are promotional, either self-promotional or company-promotional. I'm not aware of any blogs that are limited to practicing reverse engineers but I would love to hear about some. The problem is that as soon as a lot of us step out into the light we tend to bring a good deal of chaos and attention as it's very frequently security related and the media loves that stuff. Look at the number of non-technical people following the people doing jailbreaks or Mikko. It's insane and I'd question whether we'd want those sorts of people to come here.

We need to have resources that are constrained to practicing reverse engineers, professionally or not. Who are not in it for promotional purposes. I know I'd love to follow some.

The ones I can think of is, Bunnie, Halvar Flake, HexRays blog, Chris Tarnovsky's flylogic, Alex Ionescu's blog, j00ru's blog.

I'll try to only list the white and grey areas I can think of. You have teddyroger's tuts4you. It's filled with actual reverse engineers. A lot of them are crackers though so it might not mesh well with the image some would prefer us to project. Woodman is pretty notable and also full with talented reverse engineers. Exetools is another place where a lot of reverse engineers hang out. OpenRCE is somewhat dead but I'm sure a lot of people are still following it. A lot of people follow and do challenges on crackmes.de. OffensiveComputing is also popular.

Other than that you have a number of good places in Chinese and Russian but I won't list those.

The rest is probably largely twitter based in large webs of followers and retweeters with pools depending on what subset of reverse engineering you do. If we want to attract the attention of individuals, twitter is probably the most efficient way of getting the word out there.

Answer 2

There are two possibilities or ways in which we can bring RE.SE to the attention of bloggers :

• The Cold Approach : One of us could directly contact the blogger and share this site. However, chances of success would be much higher if somebody, who knows the individual personally, contacted him/her.

• The Engagement Approach* : We could post questions that are related to, derived from or based on the content of the most recent posts on the blog.

  • We could then invite the blogger to answer the question or engage in the discussion.
  • Alternatively, we could ensure that the question gets a comprehensive answer and then share the link with the individual.

_{*I just made up this term :)}