What I’m working on

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Blue Team Lab | Incident Detection and Response

Blue-Team Lab with some Red-Team activities | Incident Detection and Response This is a documentation of the Home Lab designed by Eric Capuano from the series "So you want to be a SOC Analyst?". The tasks in this lab include creating VMs which we will use to emulate an adversarial...

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Installing Kubernetes on Google Cloud & Cluster Hardening

Installing Kubernetes on Google Cloud Platform and Cluster Hardening This is a documentation of the lab "Kubernetes the hard way" by Kelsey Hightower. A massive thank you to Kelsey Hightower for putting this guide together. It is highly recommended to check the original lab as there are detailed explanations to...

Projects

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UIUCTF 2024 | OSINT Challenge: NIGHT
CTF

OSINT Challenge: NIGHT For this challenge, my initial thought was to check the EXIF data but the location information was removed from the metadata of the image. My second thought was to do a reverse image-search of the image provided for the challenge. After spending some time scrolling through the...

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UIUCTF 2024 | OSINT Challenge: CHUNKY BOI
CTF

OSINT Challenge: CHUNKY BOI For this challenge, there was no location in the EXIF data just as expected. Reverse image-search also did not yield any results, and unfortunately, the geospy tool that proved very useful for the previous challenge did not provide any valid data for solving this one. The...

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How to set up Kali Linux with GUI on WSL2 (Windows 11)

This article is a quick guide to setting up Kali Linux on Windows 11 with WSL2   What is WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux)? Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) is a feature of Windows that allows you to run a Linux environment on your Windows machine, without the need for...

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Part 1 | SOC Analyst Home Labs

Part 1: Creating a small virtualization environment (2 VMs) Install VMware Workstation Pro For the virtualization environment we will be using VMware. For setting up this lab we will need a machine with at least 8GB of RAM, but 16GB and above is preferable as we will be running more...

Experience

First Line Technical Support for BT
Webhelp (BT capmaign), First Line Technical Support
Glasgow, UK | May, 2021 - April, 2022

First Line Tech Support

My main duties while at this position would include taking inbound calls, troubleshooting connectivity issues for the customers over the phone, as well as performing network diagnostics via the in-house applications and depending on the results, I would book engineers to attend to the faults, send out equipment replacements where needed or explain to the customer if their own devices were being faulty and causing the performance issues.

Another big part of this role was to raise and resolve complaints for customers when they would express dissatisfaction with the products or the broadband service while maintaining a professional manner at all times.

Lastly, our department would also deal with some email issues that the customers could be having. For email issues, we would go through certain troubleshooting steps, guiding the customer through a password reset where needed, and eventually escalating email cases to Tier2 via a ticketing system if the issues would persist after the standard troubleshooting procedure.

Certifications

Badges & Skills

Education

Self-taught | Online Courses on IT & Cybersecurity
Online | May, 2021 - December, 2023

IT & Cybersecurity

In 2021 I officially started my studies in IT by purchasing an online course with "IT career-switch" which provided me with the training material and practice-labs for the CompTIA A+ and CompTIA CySA+ certifications.

During the first five months, I was preparing for my CompTIA A+ certification and upon passing those exams, I was able to find a tech-support role and continue my studies and training for the CompTIA CySA+ exams which I completed at the end of the year 2023.

Since then, I have had more time to look into the more practical side of Cybersecurity by working on online labs such as Hack the Box, Portswigger Academy and TryHackMe. Additionally, taking part in CTFs, and setting up my own lab environments, locally and on the cloud, for "Blue-team / Red-team" activities have proven to be great methods for gaining knowledge and practical experience across a variety of topics and disciplines ranging from web-app and android pentesting, to forensics, malware analysis and incident response.