OWASP announced today that it will retire its long‑standing Meetup platform, citing the high maintenance burden and the availability of newer, more feature‑rich community tools. The organization has provided a timeline for the shutdown and a checklist for local groups to move event listings, member communications, and historical archives to alternative services such as Discord, Slack, or dedicated OWASP community sites. All public pages will be read‑only after the cut‑off date, and groups are urged to export their data before it is archived.

For security teams, the migration creates several risk vectors that must be addressed. Exported member lists and discussion histories contain personal identifiers and potentially sensitive security discourse that could be harvested by threat actors if not transferred over encrypted channels. New platforms may lack the same vetting processes, increasing the chance of phishing, credential reuse attacks, or malicious bot infiltration. Defenders should audit the chosen tools for MFA, granular permission controls, and audit logging, and they must verify that legacy data is securely deleted from the retired Meetup service to prevent unintended exposure.