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GovernmentSecurity.Org, known as GSO by its 10,000+ active members, is an IT security-related website that focuses on increasing public institutional knowledge of IT vulnerabilities and security threats. It has members in over 147 countries and strives to be a valuable resource for any IT security enthusiast. Two of the administrators, GSecur and Kenny L (ComSec), from the US and UK, respectively, have kept the operation going as an active public resource since October 2002. Another two administrators, dissolutions and w00dy, assist with the day-to-day maintenance of the site along with the moderating team.
At any given point in the day there are anywhere from 200-400 guests (non-registered viewers & bots) and 25-75 members viewing the website. There is also an IRC channel that typically holds 50 to 100 people, most idling. The members database is pruned semi-annually, removing users with few or no posts to ensure the registered members remain active and the count is indicative of the true demographic for GSO. The administrations estimates well over fifty thousand unique users have created accounts over the site's four year existence.
The layout of the GovernmentSecurity forums sometimes changes, but currently the breakdown is:
- Interact with GSO
- User Submitted Links
- User Requests
- Data Stronghold
- General GSO
- GovernmentSecurity.org News & Suggestions
- In The News
- Open Topic
- IT & Computer Help
- Product and Program Reviews
- GSO Tutorials
- IT Certification Information
- Downloads
- File Downloads
- Trial Member Uploads
- System Security
- Windows Systems
- Beginners Section
- Linux & Unix Systems
- Proxy Listings
- Exploit Research & Discussion
- Trojan & Virus Errata
- System Hardening/Network Security/Firewall/IDS/VPN/Routers
- E-Mail Security
- Wifi Security
- Upload discovered Trojans & Malware
- GSO Programming Section
- C, C++, VC++
- Visual Basic
- .NET
- Perl/CGI
- Java/Javascript
- PHP/XML/ASP/HTML
- Assembly + Other
- The Cork Board
- Network Security Consultant Directory
- Network Security Jobs
- Public Information
- Encryption Information
- General Network Security
- Internet Anonymity
- HTTP Protocol Security
- Linux Security
- MS IIS Information
- Exploit Articles
- Programming / Tool Design
- GSO Software Projects
- Public Downloads
- Microsoft Security Questions and Papers
- Exploit & Vulnerability Mailing List Archives
The users of the site are broken down as follows:
- Trial Members
- Members
- Specialists
- Moderators
- Administrators
At its inception, GSecur, a network security consultant, primarily used the website as a "dump site" to store files, tools, and other odd and ends. It remained this way for nearly a year, when he decided to setup a home page and create a security portal that could be used by others.
The original orange layout was abandoned in late February of 2003 for a more favorable grey-blue, and has remained relatively unchanged since. The number of users frequenting the site at this point, began to take off. From a scant 9 registered members in February to over 1,000 in August, it was clear that the topic of IT security was becoming more and more important.
Much of the increase in membership was due to GovernmentSecurity changing focus from a news portal to a hardened IT security forum. Two users from Security-Forums.com, ComSec and dissolutions, resigned as moderator and privileged members and left to help assist GSecur in the development of the forums and site.
Credit also should be given to the Blaster/Nachi worm and RPC vulnerability here for its role in drumming up interest. Most of the information on the vulnerability was available first on GSO, and security gurus were testing compiles of exploits and reverse-engineering the Microsoft patches within weeks of its release. After Google had indexed this, a wave of new individuals came to the site to find out more and help out when the next version of the RPC vulnerability came out in early October. By the end of the month, GSO was 11,500 strong and still growing rapidly. A purging of the database occurred in November 2003 to remove inactive accounts or those who had only posted a few times.
In February 2004, much ado focused on the anonymous release of the windows source code. Many of the new users were simply posting "thnx" in replies to exploit information in order to bump their post count to the much-needed 50 posts to become a full member and get access to the downloads. A tactic of "vulturing", or posting a short phrase or one-line response to a topic that was 3 months old or older became commonplace to hit that quota. Many of these users were outright banned.
GovernmentSecurity ran into trouble with its member count passing 14,000 by June of 2004 and the cost of maintaining the website was taxing the admin and moderating staff.
New users, some previously banned or removed, would come back to try to get member accounts for access to other parts of the forums. Since several trojan and rootkit authors, including holy father of Hacker Defender (hxdef) fame, had accounts and updates on GSO, becoming a full member often meant access to some of the best anti-virus evading executables on the Internet. Administration recognized this problem and started closing and reopening registration on a quarterly basis.
Five months later, in November 2004, registrations had reached the 17000 mark, slowing considerably from lack of remote Windows 2000 and XP vulnerabilities. Focus began to increase on Internet Explorer exploits, and rootkits. It was also at this time that management made some shifts in the forum layout and began to focus more on malicious user mitigation. New policies towards malicious or suspiciously-short posts helped ensure the site's direction continued unabashed.
Recently, GovernmentSecurity's members have evolved over the years to a fully international effort and have avoided becoming complacent. Several anti-virus vendors have accounts on the forums as well as IT security mailing-list operators. The site has active members from over 30 different countries and continues to be a source of IT security info while keeping the "script kiddie" activity low. The site also has networked with other forums, such as DataStronghold, and keeps representative's at several other security forums to help mitigate DDoS threats and other hack attempts.
Archive.org's stored copies
12.226.236.161 01:13, 24 March 2006 (UTC)Yorn
Declined This looks like a great start to an article, unfortunately I am not familiar with the subject. archive.org copies are not a Reliable Source here, so when you come back (or create the article yourself) I suggest you get some independent references. --Hroðulf (or Hrothulf) (Talk) 21:21, 7 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]