Page Ranking the Cybersecurity Literature

 As all of you, the imaginary voices in my head, know  I maintain a pretty extensive meta-list of cybersecurity reading, a list of lists compiling recommendations from different companies, government / military organizations, academic institutions, and individuals.  (30+ sources and close to 900 readings at this point).  I have tried to group the sources in categories and every time a reading appears I increment a score column.  This is supposed to help gauge relative importance based on community perception.  The readings are listed alphabetically.

 

Since I started this project I have always just kind of thought of it as a handy list for myself and some of my friends, although I have blasted it out on twitter and various other forums ad nauseam, but today I realized two things:

a) other than me no one uses or cares about this list

b) In doing this I have re-invented a very clumsy way of doing page ranking,  like Google's very dimwitted cousin that the family keeps locked in the basement and who they occasionally throw some food and porn and hope no one will ever learn of their shame.

c) Although I am doing this in the most moronic and labor intensive way possible there are actually possibilities here.

d) That was three things not two, obviously I am a moron who can't count.

e) Dammit, that was four!

f) Aargh!!!!

OK, had to break out of that hell...

Anyway, I have mentioned before that it would be interesting to build a list of the articles that SANS uses in their various courses.  At the time I was mainly thinking of it as just an additional resource to help study for their exams, but now I am seeing a couple of other possibilities mainly in helping industry newcomers and students identify subjects that cut across various specialties.  It might also help build cohesion and help reinforce learning by being able to identify subjects that are found to be important by the various course authors.

(Also now that I think about it, this could serve as the basis of a talk at a convention.  DIBS!!!)

I've probably wasted enough of your time by now and I need to think about how to proceed:

I guess I could start a go-fund me for $17,500,000,000.00 so I could take all the available SANS classes and then I could manually pull the article information from the footnotes on each page, a variation, I could brush up on my python skills and try to do that automatically using digital copies.  Obviously that's not gonna happen - the last time I asked for help on line all I got was one random Fuck You.  

The other, more realistic scenario is that people may have already compiled some of this information.  If you have and you wouldn't mind sharing let me know in the comments or on twitter.