In my time at the Benecon Group I have had the opportunity to expand my cyber defense skill set by working in an industry that is both heavily regulated and heavily targeted by malicious actors. I am part of a team that understands the value and sensitivity of the information we are changed with protecting, and we take the protection of that information seriously.I have had the chance to conduct incident response operations, digital forensics, vulnerability analysis and remediation, and experience many other cyber domains. Some of my responsibilities have included reviewing alerts from our SIEM, monitoring network traffic for suspicious and anomalous behavior, conducting posture assessments, identifying and eliminating malware, implementing stronger defenses on our network, and much more.While I had previously understood that cyberattacks were a common occurrence, working in a heavily targeted industry has opened my eyes to just how frequent attacks are, and how vigilant defenders need to be. I am pleased that at the Benecon Group we take cybersecurity seriously and this has provided the opportunity for my skills to grow.

At Home Paramount I was given the opportunity to learn about administering a production network for a business that supported users across several states. My greatest fear when starting my IT career was having to diagnose problems remotely and walking end-users - who might know nothing about IT - through how to solve their troubles. I was very unconfident in my skills to do such without having the device in front of me. After starting at Home Paramount I quickly had to face this fear when I discovered that 90% of our end-users worked remotely full-time. Over time I became more confident in my diagnostic skills, and in support of these remote users I eventually took over our mobile device management (MDM) system. I implemented a series of changes to help support these remote users more effectively, including improving deployment of application updates, managing remote-access, and deploying new features to user devices.I was also exposed to a number of industry standard technologies, including VMWare and how to manage virtual servers in a production environment. One challenge connected to VMWare was understanding how to manage virtual Citrix servers and the their connection to remote thin-client devices. Additionally I took control of our WSUS server and navigated deploying updates to clients and servers, including deploying updates to virtual servers and carefully managing deploying updates to Citrix servers.While at Home Paramount I also strove to make many system improvements, including redesigning Group Policy, restructuring Active Directory, and implementing a shared knowledgebase to allow IT staff to share and access solutions with ease.

Working on a team of four other interns, this formative experience at the start of my IT career taught me basic IT processes and how to work with a variety of people. Our team was responsible for responding to help tickets submitted by end-users from diverse backgrounds and with varying degrees of computer experience. We also routinely aided in senior IT staff projects, which ran the gambit from simple tasks such as replacing UPS batteries, to tracking down a DoS attack on the school network.Requests submitted through our ticketing system were also varied and covered a wide breadth of topics that often put the technical skills I learned in class to use; but just as often exposed me to unfamiliar systems and problems that I had not previously been exposed to. Delivering solutions for these problems required external research, tapping the experience of more senior colleagues, and continued learning outside of class hours.