Link: http://titssn.net

Good day to you,

For the people that are close to me and know me in person they will tell you that I am not a stranger to life threatening or life changing issues. I always use these issues as a measure of my resilience, receptiveness, leadership and professionalism as with every challenge/issue I become stronger as a person. We all go through challenges everyday and in so doing come out one way or the other, you win or you lose. It is not every day that a life changing issue is taken to the level where one actually has a change in their lives because of it and this week has been an empowering week of challenges and issues that I must say have once again changed my life and my perceived view on some personal things.

I will honestly say this is for the better but will require making a personal sacrifice that I have long been trying to steer away from but I now know that to reach that new height/level I must do this to get past it. I feel that personal empowerment coming on but this issue is blocking me from reaching out and grasping it with both hands but now I have to do what I have feared for a long time, let go and grab on to that new inner power and get ready for a new year with many more challenges and issues.

I see all problems as challenges and with every challenge comes the power to tackle it but whether you win or lose is up to you and how much you fight the challenge and want to win. For me, I always over come my challenges one way or another and in the end I weigh in on the battle to see if what I lost (if I lost anything) was worth the gain. Sometimes we tend to analyze things too much and in the end we lose the battle not to the actions but to the thoughts and mental powers that it took to overcome them.

As I look forward to a new year I am reminded of the question my 7yrs old son once asked me last year. He said,

Daddy, what does a new year mean for you, do you get older, taller or smarter or what?

Well, I was more surprised at the question rather than answering it but I said to him, well, I know I will get older by a number because that’s what each new year brings and I may get taller because I am still growing but, while all these things are happening I am hoping to get much smarter in the process by filling my brain with the knowledge, info and resources needed to maintain being smarter while getting older and taller.

I now move forward with my overcoming this challenge and looking forward to a new year and many more.

~Brett A. Scudder~
The IT Security Attaché

Link: http://titssn.net

Season’s Greetings everyone.

TITSSN wishes everyone in the US a safe, secure, peaceful and happy Thanksgiving holiday season. It is a great time of year where family and friends get together to spend time and have some relaxing moments. It is also that time of the year where Black Friday and Cyber Monday presents hackers and other criminal elements the opportunity to target and make successful attacks on those who are not alert and aware of their tricks.

Please practice safe and secure internet usage during this time as the levels of attacks and exploits are very high. Be careful when opening greeting cards and other forms of holiday cheer as the effects may be severe. When sharing those holiday pics online, be sure to know how and where you’re adding them so as not to attract any unneeded profiling or stalking predators. Please keep in mind that some networks are more public than you think so what you’re sharing and with who may be bigger than you think.

When accepting IMs, ensure that it is from someone you know and that the person is indeed sending you the attachment and it’s not just coming from s compromised system. Send a quick response back saying "hey, are you trying to send me a file(s)?" to help verify that someone is on the other end that did initiate the transfer.

When opening emails with attachments, please check the recipients info carefully and validate that it is from someone you know. Trusted people/senders are also a high risk if not properly verified.

When opening links to other websites in those emails, please check to see that the link does refer to the correct destination/site and not some other site that may lead to a drive-by-download of malicious codes and threats.

When in doubt, reach out.

This is just a message of safety/security education and awareness from your friendly and concerned IT Security friends at TITSSN.

Have a safe and secure holiday season.

~TITSSN~

Link: http://www.htc.com/us/product.aspx?id=71530

Good day to you,

What can I say but wow, this is a very nice device and I finally found some quality time to play with it.

Coming from the HTC Mogul to this gave me some uncomfortable feelings with the device but I must say, it is still a sweet device to have and hold till the next best one comes long.

The touch, the feel, the loaded apps and new functions/features. Oh yea, forget all that, my most favorite app/feature so far is the Opera Mobile browser with tabbed browsing. Yep, now you can have 3 simultaneous websites open and working while running on the high speed 3G connectivity of the data network.
What I love about it.

The faster processor - Qualcomm® MSM7501A™ 528 MHz
Windows Mobile® 6.1 Professional
The additional built in memory. ROM: 512 MB - RAM: 288 MB
The support for 16GB memory sticks.
The built in GPS and navigation system.
The new build in apps and services.
TouchFLO™ 3D - Touch-sensitive navigation control - Motion G-sensor
Connectivity - Bluetooth® 2.0 with Enhanced Data Rate and A2DP for stereo wireless headsets - Wi-Fi® : IEEE 802.11 b/g - HTC ExtUSB™ (11-pin mini-USB 2.0 and audio jack in one)
Sprint’s Network Dual-band (800/1900MHz), CDMA2000 1xEVDO Rev. A/1xRTT and IS-95A/B voice or data with up to 1.8 Mbps up-link and 3.1 Mbps down-link
Built in active directory domain support and enrollment.\
The 2.8-inch TFT-LCD flat touch-sensitive screen with 480x640 VGA resolution.
Tabbed browsing through the Opera Browser.
Integration of the top 3 IM clients/services.
Video Out so I can do presentations from my phone (i’ve been waiting for this one for a while).
Internet sharing, printing and faster network processing speeds.
The addition of the YouTube player will get a lot of attention even more than the Sprint TV.
An more….

I love the part where the device asks if you want to run it in Activesync or file storage mode when you connect it to a PC. Sometimes I just need the storage piece and not the activesync functions/features but you couldn’t do that before but now you can. Simply a well needed feature and I’m so glad they added it.

My disappointment comes in a few issues.

1. The screen should have been bigger. Too much space used up by the top keys when visibility was most essential. The HTC logo and navigation key took up needed screen space on the front and that’s one thing I loved about the iPhone, lots of screen space to see and manipulate viewing.
2. The changed up the speaker and now it sounds like the cheap ear pieces you get on the streets.
3. When using the TouchFLO the system is slowed significantly. If this was supposed to be the base of the device they should have enhanced it more for it to run more smoothly.
4. The message icon in the TouchFLO setting only shows up to 99+ message alerts. I like to see my actual numbers.
5. The keys are smaller than those of the Mogul where you get the extra line of keys from. The Mogul had 4 lines of keys which was quite fine for those with slightly bigger fingers than others and now they packed even more into the keyboard so the keys are flat and smaller making it harder to type on.
6. The device slide open from the left which is kind of awkward as sliding from the right is more suitable for a right hander like myself.

Anyway, I just wanted to give you guys an update as I wanted to release the review over the past weekend. I will release it by Wednesday if my schedule permits. As you can see from the first image, they came out a little bigger than expected because of the skin that was used and so I have to redo all 30+ of them to smaller sizes.

Here are a few images of the device in use.

The TouchFLO Home Page/Today Screen





The Default Windows Mobile Today Screen - some of my app plug-ins are on
there as well.



The Device Info/Specs.




The Weather - very important as i’m always on the road and need constant
weather alerts and updates.


The settings and config page.


The Internet.


The Start Menu.


Instant Messengers - AIM, YIM and Windows Live Messenger - all configurable
from one screen.


Opera Mobile - in tabbed view.


Opera Mobile - 3 tabs limit.


Storage Encryption is still available and I hope everyone uses it.


The device when opened.



Thank you,

~Brett A. Scudder~

Link: http://titssn.net

Come on now MySpace, 10 characters long password restriction is ridiculous these days, please give us more.

Can you imagine that, MySpace has a 10 characters limit for passwords. I was working on my MySpace page today (it’s been a while, a year to be exact) and decided to change my passphrase. Well, lo and behold the dreadful red flag came up saying I cannot use more than 10 characters. I was like (well let’s just say the words that came out are not appropriate for this publicly viewed board (laughing out loud and hysterically)).

Who wouldn’t want to secure their social networking site/page in a serious way with a long passphrase (notice I said passphrase and not password)?

My current passphrase doesn’t fit in. It’s too long and goes like this, I-L0v3_My-m0mm4- s0_ much-1t=hurt$-:-). Try logging into 10 sites for the day with that and see how it feels. I once got an reply from a site saying it was too complex but I’ve never gotten one that said it wasn’t secure enough.

Hey MySpace, wake up and smell the security issues here, extend the character set please so that I may properly protect my account/information with my secure passphrase.

Can you believe it?

That reminds me, my web hosting company is the same but even worse, they allow 7 characters for account passwords (i’m shaking like a leaf at the thought of someone hacking my account with such absurd password policies). I pray to God that he protects those 7 precious characters for me please. I need to elevate this issue immediately. I had planned to in the beginning but got consumed by so many other issues it got lost in the wind. I must revisit these issues this week and check out my other critical websites to see if they are possessed with this flaw.

I will also sign a new internet bill that state the minimum character set for account password should be 15 characters. Now we’re talking.
If my account is hacked or compromised due to the inability of the web hosting provider who is to blame?

I’m off to write this new bill and send it to the president elect for him to sign off on it. I am sure he will agree since his wireless account was recently hacked. He probably had some kind of account limitation as well that led to an easy hacking of his account. So sad.

Geez.

Greetings Mr. President elect sir, may I have a word or two :-).

~Brett A. Scudder~

Link: http://titssn.net

Today I spent a few hours perusing some social networking sites and looking at the rising numbers of members and the increased focus their presentation and I was truly impressed with what I saw. With being impressed came the dark side of scaredom/feardom (two of my descriptive terms for some social networks) as I now saw a new age group of registrants on the sites that makes me even more concerned about the level(s) of access our youths have to the internet and these sites.

Should I go as far as to say the levels of unmonitored/unprotected access to the internet?

Of course I can. Here I am looking at profiles of pre-teens showing images of themselves that are bedroom secrets or images that should be more personal than being so publicly viewed. Oh my, how dear I say/use the word “publicly” when speaking about the internet.

Oh Brett stop, the internet is not public, it is private and this information is only seen by my friends and those I choose to see it.

Umm, beep (buzzer beep), you are so wrong and so misguided that it is hurting to hear such nonsense and ludicrous comments and statements in this day and age about internet use especially on social networks. You need to take a closer look at these sites and see what is really going on and how the infection of private information (pics, images, words, thoughts, feelings) are so quickly and easily shared across multiple sites today. Now you can crosslink networks to share friends, writings and other profile settings without updating them manually thus making the “private contents” even more public. Must times people don’t even know this is the case as their first and primary thought is just to get the links between both sites up and running in order to save time and effort in maintaining them.

While one site may have strong privacy settings that protects this info, the fact that you have now created this link means that the other shared site has a more open access and public facing policy that puts all that data/info about you that was once more secured in the open.

So I added a few comments of wow and some words of motivation and thanks to friends and some people I added who I just liked their profile pic and wanted to see if they would accept an invite from a total stranger and what do you know, yep, they did.

Why?
Why would you accept an invite from someone you don’t know to add you as a friend?

Maybe it is because some people (this is a rapidly growing number by the way) do believe that they do have a life on the internet and it is their primary center of motivation and self confidence and, and, a real definition of who they are, how they think, what they feel and what they want to be for themselves. Unprovoked, unlimited, untouched by anyone else’s thoughts and completely owned by me, the user.

When a person can turn to his/her page and get positive, motivational comments and feedback about themselves that makes them look and feel good, they are going to start leaning more towards that resource whether you like it or not. The traditional sense of definition of oneself is now focused on a page that lists things about you, your thoughts, images and creativity that makes you comfortable, tells your stories and can be called your own. It is this same need and desire for an online presence and definition that the hackers and bad guys are using to social engineer methods of spamming and phishing that are being so successful today. It will even be more heightened now with the economic issues looming and more people turning to online resources for help and other benefits.

What is going on people?
Are we not paying close attention to these online issues?
What does it mean when your child spends more time locked away in their room on the internet and you don’t know what they are doing or who they are doing it with?
Are parents still that naïve to the whims and fancies of the internet and its use/functionality/features/resources and all that?
Do parents sit with their children to talk about these issues?
Do you allow them to use IM and have social networking accounts that you monitor?
Are our children being bullied/stalked/provoked/harassed online that is now affecting them physically and you’re not aware of it?
If they are, are they sharing that info with you?
What do you do if/when they share it, do you become a friend or parent to try and address the issue(s) to gain the trust of the child or your actions/words force them farther away and into depression?
If you cannot, who do you turn to?
What will it take for people to realize that this is a real issue that presents real physical, mental, psychological impacts/effects?
What will it take for you to stop reading things of this nature and brushing it off as nonsense?

Come on people, it is time to wake up and realize that we are moving to an age that is solely being driven on and by the information superhighway of the world Wide Web and if we can’t understand and embrace it now what will happen when it becomes more mainstream?

Let us develop more education and awareness programs geared specifically towards the internet and its values, resources, impacts and effects so that when it becomes mainstream (as if it isn’t already so) we can have a better handle on it from all fronts. Mobile devices are making strong impacts on these networks as they allow you to snap pics and post them straight to the network. Imagine the impact that will have on people as they move about in their daily lives and is about to do this without any hassles. Imagine the kind of content that will be made available to others. We have seen so many instances where these things have been caught on mobile devices and posted all over the net.

It could be or happen to you. So, I will continue to probe and peruse these networks as I try to keep abreast on these new trends and developments while keeping you good people on top of the reality of things.

Get educated, be aware, stay alert and by all means secure yourselves and your family/loved ones.

~Brett A. Scudder~

Link: http://www.fox.com/24/redemption/

I don’t know about you but 24 is the only TV series I am seriously addicted to. CSI is ok but 24 is in a league by itself and I am just too ecstatic about its return on Sunday 23rd.

I wonder if I can watch season 6 to catch up before Sunday, hmm, now that would be some serious schedule changes for the weekend :-).

Anyway, it will be quite a Redemption on Sunday. I just found a group on LinkedIn that is about the series and of course I joined it.

~Brett A. Scudder~

Link: https://ui.labor.state.ny.us/UBC/home.do

Good day to you,

If you thought being unemployed was bad, wait until you file for unemployment and is approved but is not able to get your claims started. I thought this was a critical enough issue to share as I have a few friends/associates who are experiencing these issues.

There are a growing number of people who are having this problem where they are required to call in and claim their unpaid waiting week through an 888 number but it has been such of a nightmare getting through to anyone there that it is very depressing. This process must be completed before your weekly claims starts and so if you don’t get that call in you are screwed.

There are people who have been approved for benefits over a month ago and are still unable to get the benefits because they can’t get through to the department that starts off the first claim(s).

One would think that due to the higher than normal applications for unemployment that there would be more resources being put in place to accept these calls or complete the full process online. However, that is not the case and even after calling ten times for the day one still cannot get through. The online website point you to that number to call and when you call it you get the very popular response of, "due to the very high number your call will not be accepted today".

This system is open from 8-5pm and with the thousands of new applicant’s everyday this is very daunting. I can’t understand why the number of applicants is increasing but they are still using a system that is open from 8-5 only. This is ridiculous to say the least. They should make a 24hrs resource available for people to use so that the new people joining in can get through. At the present rate it will take six months to get this process started which only lasts for six months. We’re at an all time 16years high but still using an old outdated system to process the start of these approvals. Wow.

The question now becomes, will they pay the back benefits that were missed since being approved?

So, if you are unemployed and looking forward to receiving this monetary assistance/benefit, hold on to your breath as it may take more than you think to get it. I wish everyone the best in their efforts to get this process started.

Someone should reach out to the governor’s office to alert them of these issues. When we reached out to the Department of Labor we were advised that the process required calling that number and that it couldn’t be that hard to do. We, it’s not hard to call the number, it is just impossible to get through to it.

Keep the faith, hold your head up and have a great day,

~Brett A. Scudder~

Good day to you,

It has been a few months in the works but we are now very excited that we have finalized the plans to open our high tech Technology Café /Entertainment/Conference Center in Arverne. As new residents to the Arverne community, we have been working to introduce more IT/Security forums, events and community programs to the area and have been working with the local community to do so. Our monthly technology open discussion forums and other events have shown that we are serious about taking this community initiative to higher levels of technological advancements and elevate the education and awareness of IT and secure best practices for all.

We have been looking for an existing building in the area that we can purchase to build our Technology Café/ Entertainment/Conference Center by the Sea but have been delayed in finding a suitable one thus far. Our aim is to create an environment where people can come in and see/play with the latest technology trends and be able to talk with specialists on/about them in a laid back friendly setting. Our conference center will feature a high tech setting for meetings and other collaborative needs of the business community with access to internet, voice and other specialized resources. The center will also host a technology lab for simulating the development, deployment, testing of technology in various types of business and sizes.

Each month we will host specific IT Security forum sessions geared towards addressing the ever growing issues/impacts/concerns about the internet and its threats and use. With the growing number of technology devices (laptops, Ultra Mobile PCs, Smartphones, touch screen devices, handhelds and more) and the partnerships we have with the major players in this space, we will make this café/center into a high tech advance learning and entertainment resource for our community. These technologies/gadgets will also be a part of our center to enhance the learning and visibility of our visitors/member/affiliates and friends.

Our monthly educational sessions will cater to the community in general fostering the needed education and awareness that will take us into the future of technology with the needed understanding of what, where, when and how they will be integrated in our everyday lives. We are working with the local schools to have field trips to the center where our youths can gain from this advancement and help them to make better decisions on technology and the path to pursue a career in this field.

As we work on building out this resource, we are also looking to expand into other areas later on as we see the need for this level of community involvement from the technology specialists and organizations that can deliver it. The center will bring added employment/learning opportunities for residence of the community as we will have positions that will need to be filled.

Stay with us as we complete the last stages and get ready for launch in early 2009. We will be having an awesome launch event with guests like Ernie “Ghostbuster” Hudson and more celebrities who have joined our cause of getting this initiative of education and awareness out to the communities.

We look forward to the support and patronage of our community members and hopes that this will be the start of a great networking/collaborative effort for all.

Thank you and have a great day,

~Brett A. Scudder~
President/CEO/Chairman
~TITSSN~

Link: http://titssn.net

Good day to you,

We are having some major electrical work done in our office today and will be offline for a few hours. We will be back soon.

Thank you,

~Brett A. Scudder~

Link: http://www.linkedin.com/e/gis/44598

Good day to you,

I have been asked a number of times lately about what is happening and why I haven’t been writing or doing much these days. This is quite the opposite as I have been working 20+hour days in trying to gain a bigger/wider and more interested audience to bring into the network via the LinkedIn network. It is a remarkable experience to be a part of such a network where real people truly do participate and are active in the happenings of the site. Last weekend I decided to spend some time trying to clean up the 447 messages that had accumulated in my inbox from various circumstances.

I am a very regular user of the Q&A section and as such when I ask a question that generates let us say 50 responses, I have to return a thank you and comment to the response. I do this because I believe that if the person took the time to read and respond to the question the least I can do is say thank you. If the recipient decides to pursue the conversation more, it opens up a flow of messages that can go anywhere from 5-6 exchanges on the matter. Therefore when asking a question I try to prepare for a backlash of active conversing back and forth and so the hefty inbox. So I woke up with a plan to tackle my inbox and 48hours later I had responded/exchanged 787 messages. I had to give up as it was now Monday morning and I had to get back into the regular work mode.

So, it is not that I am not active nor working on the network stuff, it is the fact that LinkedIn has consumed my time because I am having great success in spreading the word of IT Security, its need, its criticality and building the network on a global level. As I look at my network stats now, I see that I am linked to 10 million professionals, wow, and have the ability to voice things that are seen and heard. Talk about an awesome networking/collaboration resource, LinkedIn is it. What I have been working on locally/nationally here in the US for the past 4 yrs, I have been able to accomplish in 6 months on LinkedIn on a global level.

Isn’t that awesome?
The ability to reach out and get positive responses from professional in your field of work and be able to communicate in real-time is just remarkable and shows the powers of social networks when used properly.

LinkedIn recently added the group discussions feature and that was all I needed to launch a major initiative of building collaboration within our 20+ groups. This feature allowed me to invite members to join in and discuss security related topics, issues and other matters of management, ethics and etiquette in IT. So here I am trying to deal with keeping up with the Q&A and now adding group discussions into the mix, hmm, did someone say more time please?

After the group discussions feature was added I started focusing on our groups primarily as I needed to build the name of the organization and our initiatives because after all, the is a social network and presents many ways of being phished, compromised or targeted so what better place to get my work done. The groups were already created and there but now with the discussion feature it was like new life, energy and hope was put into them.

Here’s a look at a few of our primary groups and their stats/info.

Our primary group is TITSSN - The IT Security Suite Network with 198 members located here http://www.linkedin.com/e/gis/44598. This is the group I am trying to get every TITSSN member to join as this is where everything on, about and happening with the network will be housed. It is a major bog replacement and more but for registered members and so it does have some drawbacks.
TITSSN’s Code of Honor - Advocates for the future of professional Messaging has 61 members and is located here http://www.linkedin.com/e/gis/774617. This is the more serious of the groups as we have touched on some critical issues plaguing the professional messaging space these days. I strongly suggest that you take a peek at this group.
TITSSN’s Code of Honor - Advocates for the future of IT Security Education and Awareness has 7 members and is located here http://www.linkedin.com/e/gis/872317.
TITSSN’s Windows 7/Vista SP2 Testing and Development Group has 198 members and is located here http://www.linkedin.com/e/gis/926737. This happens to be the fastest group I have ever built and that was because so many people are interested in the new OS when they saw it they were very excited about it and joined in. I had 100 members in 2 days.

A special group I created to try and help with the job placement and unemployment issues is TITSSN’s Recruiter’s Suite - For our recruiters only. This group is for recruiters I work with and allows me to interact more openly and freely with them as we try to resolve the employment and job availability issues. I screen the applicants prior to approving them access to the group.

We have a few more groups that are specific to some of our events and programs but those are the main ones. LinkedIn recently created a limitation on the number of groups you can manage and be a member of and that created many problems for us but we’re working around them. One of the biggest problems that plagues LinkedIn and continues to mar its network and name is the flagging of users and their questions in the Q&A section. LinkedIn allows people to flag questions if they think it is inappropriate and they don’t have a problem with it because they claim that the Q&A is visible to all and anyone has to right to do so. Any network that allows this kind of anonymity towards its members is bound to fail as you’re giving people the power to abuse others.

LinkedIn has great potentials but the senior management team needs to be more aware of the happenings of the network and the people they are catering to and listen to them. They need to instill better levels of professionalism, ethics and respect in the network so that it can better cater to the cross cultures, races and ethnicities of people.BR>

So, as you can see, my hands are quite full and working hard. I already did over 500 correspondences from LinkedIn for this week and it’s just Wednesday. I implore the IT professionals to join the network and help build on it.

You can fine me here http://www.linkedin.com/in/titssn in the network.

Thank you very much and have a great day. We apprecilove your business and support.

~Brett A. Scudder~
President/Chairman/Founder/Security Architect
The IT Security Suite Network ~TITSSN~

Link: http://titssn.net/forum

Good day to you,

After battling with massive SPAM posts, BOT registrations, code changes and other methods of blocking the SPAMMERS from our forum board, I have decided to take the board offline until further notice. The initial plan was to move the database from the old forum located at http://theitsecuritysuite.net/forum/phpBB2/ to the new forum board at http://titssn.net/forum but we had some problem with the code and conversion and so we’ll keep reference links between the two for now until we can sort everything out on the backend. The main forum board will be http://titssn.net/forum going forward.

I apologize for the graphical images/posts that were plastered over some areas the board and we tried as best we could to keep up with them but enough was enough and so until further notice the old forum will be closed. Even though we made the registration process harder for the SPAM Bots, the bot masters took the time to register, test and then launch a wide scale attack on the forum. This goes to show that these people will go to any lengths to get their content and work out if they decide to target you. This was a very sophisticated targeted attack and we are taking a serious attempt to shut it down once and for all.

We will reopen the old forum shortly to be able to view the existing posts but will cut off the registration of new accounts and the adding of new posts.

I ask for your patience as we work out these issues and bring more visibility to our new forum board.

Thank you very much and have a great day. We apprecilove your business and support.

~Brett A. Scudder~
President/Chairman/Founder/Security Architect
The IT Security Suite Network ~TITSSN~

Link: http://titssn.net

Good day to you,

Over the past few months we have been working with our members, customers, clients, associates, partners and friends in trying to deal with the growing issues of the economic crisis and how it is/was affecting them. We have seen many effects as a result of these new/changing developments and the ways in which people have been trying to adjust and, are looking forward with a dismal view on the next few months ahead. It is no surprise that we, TITSSN, are also being impacted by these changes and the effects and had to be finding ways to work with and around some of the sudden changes that comes to us in these times. As we put our network and resources to the test and open new avenues and means of providing access to jobs, resources and direct contacts to employment opportunities, the impact has weighed in heavily and we are still holding on as best we can to do the best we can.

As a network of people in different geographic areas, cultures and societies, we had to pull together to see what the best ways in which are we can ride out the storm while still delivering the qualities and value of our work and initiatives. There have been many ongoing changes within the network of which we had to add a leg or an arm here and there to try to maintain balance and support for our members and chapters. Unfortunately, the toll has gotten too much to bear as our senior members were also falling victims to the numerous layoffs and job cuts and we now find ourselves looking to do for us what we do for our network, stay alive and take care of our families.

Our vendors/partners are also going through many internal changes and plans that we in place for upcoming meetings/workshop were/are being changed/cancelled due to a lack of resources as the layoff and job cuts are also being seen and felt there.

It is as a result of these critical changes in the personal lives of our leadership team members and partners/vendors that we are suspending all network chapters events and happenings until some level of normality can be restored to our leadership teams in these areas and, a sense of comfort in picking up where we left off can be restored. We are deeply saddened by these changes as there is no greater time than the present that our work, initiatives and educational programs are in high demand and need. The internet has grown into not just a means of transport but an integral part of our daily lives at home and work and the threats have increased in numbers and sophistication. While the economic crisis is growing so are the nefarious ways in which systems are being compromised through sophisticated phishing and social engineering tactics. We hope that these situations will be resolved and we can get back on the path we started out on quickly but with more vigilance as we try to pick up the pace in catching up.

I ask for your patience and support as we work through these issues/changes and while we are down on the local fronts, our online communities are gaining more momentum and traction on a global scale which is helping to drive our initiatives even further than expected. The LinkedIn network has been an invaluable resource for us as it gives us the access to professionals across all markets, segments, cultures and business size and is something we could never afford to do ourselves. The power of social networks/networking transcends through this network and adds many valuable resources that will allow us to rise up from these challenges and rise above our expectations.

You can join our group on LinkedIn here http://www.linkedin.com/e/gis/44598 as we move towards using it as our primary collaborative resource. The introduction of the group discussions feature has heightened the use of this resource allowing direct conversing with a global professional’s community on a common understanding and issues, IT Security. I look forward to your support there as we build a global IT Security education and awareness infrastructure.

TITSSN will continue to host our monthly meetings at our headquarters here in New York City every 2nd Thursday of the month from 6-9pm and our monthly hands-on training and development workshops every 3rd Tuesday from 1-6pm at the local Microsoft Briefing Center located at 1290 Avenue of the Americas, 6th Floor, NY, NY, 10104. Our Washington DC, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Denver Colorado and other developing chapters will cease all activities until further notice. We are not gone, we are not leaving, we are taking this time to reevaluate and reinvent ourselves to rise up bigger, stronger and better than before.

If you have any questions on these changes please feel free to contact me or our Secure Relations Team of which we’ll be happy to talk with you more. Please stay tuned to our website for more updates and information.

Thank you very much and have a great day. We apprecilove your business and support.

~Brett A. Scudder~
President/Chairman/Founder/Security Architect
The IT Security Suite Network ~TITSSN~
Brett.Scudder@titssn.net | http://titssn.net | (877) 539-8614 / (718) 928-6516
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