Northern Virginia Security Community

Each week, we’ll highlight a major city in the US and cover the places and events you can go to in that area to get your security information fix. This post is part of the information security communities.

This northern Virginia houses the headquarters of several federal agencies and so it’s not surprising that a lot of information security professionals call it home. Here are some local professional groups in this area.

• OWASP Northern VA Local Chapter – The original founding of this group was in  2004 as the DC Chapter. It has now grown to be its own, with meetings held every first Thursday of the month. Get some insights from past meetings and browse future events through their Twitter feed and mailing list.
• ISSA – NoVA Chapter -This groups meets every third Thursday. View the past presentations or RSVP for the next meeting on January 20.
• ISACA Virginia Chapter – Meetings for this group are held in The Place over ar Innsbrook, every third Tuesday. Get in touch with them here.
• Richmond InfraGard Chapter – This group holds its meetings quarterly, though the next one isn’t set yet. Check out their previous meetings and find out how you can be a member.
• Northern Virginia AITP – Meetings are held in the Fort Myers Officer’s Club. The site isn’t quite as updated (last meeting posted was on 2008) but you can click through the link and contact the chapter officers for more info.

There are also a couple of local meetings in this region if you are more into nitty gritty than the coat and tie.

• DC2600 – We mentioned them already in the Washington, DC post but of course it’s worth mentioning them once more since they also cover the Northern Virginia area. Meetings are held at Champps Pentagon every first Friday of the month. This is way closer than the VA2600 but you are welcome to come over there too. Subscribe to the Twitter feed and read the forums for more info.
• NoVAH! – Also known as the Northern Virginia DC Area Infosec Group. If my computations are correct, they meet every second Monday. There’s a lot of interesting video up in their site so do check it out.
• NoVA Sec – It looks like the blog hasn’t been updated in a while but it is worth mentioning. Meetings took place every final Thursday.

For those who like tearing things apart in the physical sense, here are a couple of hackerspaces for you.

• hack.rva – A young Richmond hackerspace that has meets every Thursday. Lots of stuff going on from an event calendar, to a Twitter feed to a Wiki.
• JerrySpace – There’s also this one, not quite ready for prime time but should be a good thing to check out.

Lastly, you can attend a few of the security events in NoVA.

• BlackHat DC – One of the most well-known security events in the world makes its way to Arlington. Event starts on January 16.
• SANS North Virginia – Get ready for some intense training and learning when SANS comes into town on the 15th of April.
• Government Cyber Security Readiness Summit – The recently concluded three day summit was one of the premier must-attends for federal security professionals in the Virginia, Maryland and DC areas.
• DojoCon – In contrast with the previous events, this is not a formal conference. Great happening nevertheless so wait for it again around the latter part of this year.

There might be a few groups and events we missed. If so, feel free to chime in at the comments.