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Hi everyone, my name is Omri and I’m MonSec’s president for the academic year of 2023. In this blog post, I will tell you about:

the club’s goals for the upcoming academic year
what changes we’ve made to our online resources
a hint of what we have planned for semester 1

Goals #

We want to increase our presence on social media in terms of reach, and also in terms of the frequency and verity of content types. As a result, those who follow our social media will receive more updates regarding:

weekly and non-weekly activities
member highlights
cybersecurity-related news
miscellaneous updates

Our Relationship with Sponsors & Partners #

In order to stay current in regards to industry and academic trends, we want to integrate our sponsors and partners more closely to our activities. Whether a sponsor/partner want to join us in one of our on-campus events for a workshop/presentation they made, or just to casually talk to our members, we would happy to coordinate and organise it with them. Moreover, we revamped our sponsorship tiers in order to stay competitive and offer our sponsors more value in return for the increased fees.

Changes #

Officially Not-for-Profit #

With tremendous help from our past president Peter, as of semester 2 of last year we are officially registered with the Australian Charities & Not-for-profits Commission. This registration will allow us to dramatically reduce our spending on cloud hosting and infrastructure, and invest it in other areas that our members and sponsors will appreciate just as much.

Website & CTFd #

Our website now includes the following pages:
- Member Highlights for showcasing notable achievements of our members.
- A more detailed resources page with member-authored documentation.
  - The Kali Linux set-up guide has been split into smaller articles that are easier to digest.
In addition, we added a new theme to our main CTFd instance.

The keen-eyed among you would notice that we moved to a new cloud services provider for our CTFd deployments. This wouldn’t have been possible without last year’s sysadmin Matti, who laid the ground work for our infrastructure-as-code and continuos deployment pipeline.

As part of our effort to be more active on social media, we have opened Mastodon account, which will serve as an additional channel for notifications and updates, that caters to those aren’t satisfied with centralised social media.
Due to inactivity and duplication of functionality with our Discord server, we have decided to close our Facebook group. We are not closing our Facebook page.

E-mail Directory & Other Channels #

We want to establish a more accessible communication channel between the committee to members, sponsors and partners, which is why we have set-up a more detailed e-mail directory for each committee member, executive role and operational department (on our contact details page). In addition, we also detail on the committee page additional communication channels for sponsors and partners to contact us via additional non-e-mail avenues.

Credits #

I would like to thank our members, past committees, our sponsors and partners for helping us to keep fulfilling our mission in such a wholesome way.

cover photo for this blog — Hopefully Mutahar and Linus appreciate this meme… (made with GIMP)

Almost-Spoilers #

Our O-Week stall (20th to the 23rd of February during 12PM to 4PM)
Special industry guests in upcoming workshops
Never-seen-before perks for active members