graduate admissions - Getting back into academics after an industry stint: what can I do while still in industry to improve my research profile?

I am a computer science engineer with around 3 years of experience designing and implementing large scale software systems. I chose to join a job right after my masters, to get a feel of what the industry holds. Having spent my bit here, I now want to get back to academics, especially back into my areas of specialisation. I hold a masters in computer science with a specialisation in Information Security, but no publications. I have a decent (mediocre?) GPA of 8.8 in my masters. I also managed to publish a thesis during my stay in college. However, there is no publication associated with the subject matter of the thesis itself.

What should I do to build upon my profile? Here's a list of things I'm already trying -

1. Contributing to Open Source Software in Security.


2. Changing my job to fit a more "security" based profile. However, as I have not worked directly in this area for the past three years, this is proving to be a tad difficult.


3. Trying to learn the ropes of ethical hacking (think bugcrowd for instance).

What I have NOT done (yet)-

1. Directly contacting professors/post-grads (or even peers who got into research) working in the areas I'm interested in.

I'm not sure if all this, even though time consuming, would lead to any concrete results. Can my industry experience lead to anything? Am I on the right track? What are other things I could do?

To be more specific, I'm looking for pointers to things that can be done while in the industry to construct a research profile.