Jay Jacobs (@jayjacobs)—my co-author of the soon-to-be-released book Data-Driven Security—& I have been hard at work over at the book’s sister-blog cranking out code to help security domain experts delve into the dark art of data science.

We’ve covered quite a bit of ground since January 1^st, but I’m using this post to focus more on what we’ve produced using R, since that’s our go-to language.

Jay used the blog to do a long-form answer to a question asked by @dseverski on the SIRA mailing list and I piled on by adding a Shiny app into the mix (both posts make for a pretty #spiffy introduction to expert-opinion risk analyses in R).

Jay continued by releasing a new honeypot data set and corresponding two-part^[1,2] post series to jump start analyses on that data. (There’s a D3 geo-visualization stuck in-between those posts if you’re into that sort of thing).

I got it into my head to start a project to build a password dump analytics tool in R (with much more coming soon on that, including a full-on R package + Shiny app combo) and also continue the discussion we started in the book on the need for the infusion of reproducible research principles and practices in the information security domain by building off of @sucuri_security’s Darkleech botnet research.

You can follow along at home with the blog via it’s RSS feed or via the @ddsecblog Twitter account. You can also play along at home if you feel you have something to contribute. It’s as simple as a github pull request and some really straightforward markdown. Take a look the blog’s github repo and hit me up (@hrbrmstr) for details if you’ve got something to share.