Unlike most academic journals, DTRAP has two columns. This blog post is to talk about those columns and hopefully inspire you (my reader) to write one.
First, I should talk about why you should write a column as opposed to a blog post. Or at least, why I think you should.
Anyone can write a blog. I’m writing a blog, if I can do it, you can do it. I could even write a blog post about how all ransomware will make the color of your screen turn slightly purple. I made that up, by the way. If you come across this post via google, that statement is not true.
Though if you quote it somewhere, please cite me. I will be entertained!
The point is, there’s generally no vetting process for blogging. Companies may have a process but a single person can post whatever they want. I mean, I could even say a DDOS will turn your network yellow (again, another fictional statement).
If you write a column for DTRAP, we have an expert in that field read over the column and tell us if they think it’s worth publishing. In other words, what you’re getting is a check mark from an expert that this is worth something. It’s more than just a random thought, it’s a real idea that someone says has merit.
Also, blogs can go away. A column in DTRAP is archived by ACM and… will never go away.
Third, DTRAP has prestige. We’re an ACM journal, something that we publish has more prestige than a random blog. I’m not saying your blog is random, I’m just giving you reasons why I think you should write for us.
So, now that I covered why, I should cover what.
DTRAP has two columns, one is ‘WIth the Benefit of Hindsight’ and the other is ‘From Research to Practice’.
The author George Santayana said “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”. Cybersecurity isn’t an incredibly old field, compared to say, medicine, but we do have history. We want you (our author) to take a historical event and look at it with current eyes. What did we learn from it? What could we have done differently to prevent it? How can we keep something like that from happening now?
One of the first events I dealt with was the Alternic incident. I had to explain to management where I worked what happened and how it affected us. What did I learn from it? What could have we done differently to prevent it? Those are questions I could address if I wrote a column on it. Or you could write one on an event that you remember or learned about. What about the Morris Worm? Or the I-Love-You virus? You could even consider an event that only affected you locally. What did you learn from your first DDOS?
That’s the first column. The second column is on “From Research to Practice”. Have you ever taken an idea from a research paper and used it at your organization? How did you make it work? What did you learn from it? Almost every idea we use today started with someone saying “I wonder if this’ll work…”. Like Firewalls or IDS or Antivirus. Someone had the idea and in some cases wrote a paper. That idea moved from the paper (research) to a program on the computer (practice). This is never a smooth transition, but you can always learn how to smooth it out from the process.
You can also use this column as a way to talk to researchers. If you have seen a new trend in practice that you think a researcher could use, write about it. Tell the researcher why you think it’s important.
If you have any questions about writing columns, contact us. We’re here to help!