InfoSecNZ was founded on 2017-05-06 by Kim Carter (@BinaryMist), a frequent speaker at NZ information security conferences, and author of PurpleTeam. Kim identified an unfilled need for a place where New Zealand’s Information Security community could come together and share their projects and passions. To meet that need, he created the InfoSecNZ Slack instance.

By February 2018, the Slack had grown enough that three additional admins were brought on to assist: @SparkleOps, @Noodles, and @Rhyven. After @SparkleOps’ departure from NZ a year later, @Rhyven and @Noodles continued as the main admins of the Slack until April 2023; @BinaryMist had stepped back from the Slack over the years to pursue his other passions, but remained the Workspace Owner over the Slack itself.

As the community grew, the Slack platform struggled to keep pace with the needs of the growing community. By 2021 the Slack was seeing in excess of 11,000 messages per week, and membership was approaching 900 users. At the time, the free tier of Slack only held 10,000 messages, so a conversation the week prior would be lost to the sands of time.

At the same time, the community was becoming less of a cybersercurity forum, and more of a community hub where people - originally connected by a passion for security - now were living part of their lives on InfoSecNZ. The security-specific channels (e.g., #cloud-security or #developer-security0 were virtually dead, while the #delicious-morsels channel was overflowing with photos of dinners, recipes, and conversation about brewing beer. The #ask-anything channel was just as likely to see someone looking for a good air purifier or window vaccum, as it was to see questions about selecting a password manager. InfoSecNZ had become a community of people, not simply a community of specialists.

On 2022-07-20, conversation again turned to the limits of Slack’s free tier, and the subject of migrating to a more modern platform - Discord - was again floated by the membership. At this time @Rhyven took the opportunity to register a new InfoSecNZ Discord server, however no effort to migrate was made until 2023-03-12 - when things began moving in earnest. A new, bigger group of admins were selected; rules were written; channels were created; and a bot was configured to enforce a manual acceptance of the rules before gaining entry.

The new Discord was officially launched on 2023-04-19, and since then InfoSecNZ has been located on Discord.