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About

<time datetime="2023-09-07 00:00:00 &#43;0000 UTC">7 September 2023</time><span class="px-2 text-primary-500">&middot;</span><span title="Reading time">3 mins</span>

Background #

As far as formal schooling goes, my background is in Computer Science, and I’m currently finishing up my Masters of Cybersecurity. During my studies I’ve taken classes on data privacy and security, software security, advanced network and computer security, operating systems, cyber-physical system security and much more. I’ve also got a solutions architect associate certification in AWS. The formal education was nice, but I’m also of the opinion that much of what I learned likely could have been gleaned from the internet.

Furthermore, just because someone has certifications or a degree doesn’t mean they truly understood or internalized the material. Additionally, school will offer a good introduction into something, but there’s only so much you can cover in a semester. That’s at least partly why this website exists. To document my further explorations into some of these topics, and to share some of what I have alredy learned.

Note About The Site #

If you’d like more information about my work history, acomplishments and that sort of thing check out my LinkedIn. This site is not associated with the work I do for my current employer. These are my personal interest and learnings, and of course any opinions are my own and are not reflective of my employers opinions. :)

Competitions #

Onto the fun stuff! So I helped run my colleges cyber security club. Through it I’ve met a ton of awesome people, and I was lucky enough to participate in some competitions. Since entering the industry it’s been tougher to do these, but I still try to work through CTF’s on hackthebox in my spare time.

Cyberforce #

In this competition we had to defend an ICS network. The first time it was some sort of industrial generator network, and the second time it was a solar array network. The first time we did abysmal, but the second time we took 12th place out of 120+ teams. The competition was hosted by Argonne National Laboratory in partnership with the Department of Energy. While defending the network we had to work through a bunch of injects, or random CTF challenges/puzzles. Lot’s of fun.

Midwest Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition (MCCDC) #

The first security competition I ever participated in. This one involves defending an IT network from a red team. It’s backdoored, running a bunch of old software. It also had us doing injects while keeping the network up.

National Cyber League (NCL) #

This is a more Jeapordy-style CTF where you have a few categories of challenges like steganography, cryptograhy, reverse engineering, log analysis, etc. I really enjoyed the reverse engineering challenges. It familiarized me with Ghidra, and the process of dissasembling and piecing together what a program does. I haven’t don’e this one in a few years, but I hope to do it again soon. It runs twice a year in the spring and fall.

Active Projects #

Homelab #

I’ve got a little proxmox server I’m building out. I’ve been researching ways to deploy stuff to it using terraform. With this I’m hoping to sharpen my Active Directory knowledge, as well as my networking knowledge. More to come on this in a future blog.

What I’m currently learning about #

Cloud #

Mostly focusing on AWS, but with OpenAI and Microsofts partnership I’m planning to dive into Azure. Right now I’ve been tinkering with Infrastructure as Code, deploying resources into the cloud using Terraform and understanding what a good secure architecture in the cloud looks like.

Cyber-physical system security #

More to come on this

Przemek Warias
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Przemek Warias
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