Having already undertaken a placement at ITC in the summer of 2018, I knew that it was somewhere that I liked working. The feel of the company suited me well and I enjoyed the work that I did during the placement. When I had to choose a placement for this summer, ITC was the first company that came to mind, and I am very grateful to everyone who helped arrange for me to return.
So far, the bulk of my work has been with Microsoft Azure, specifically looking at integrating threat intelligence from MISP, an open source intelligence platform, into Azure Sentinel. Through this I have learnt a great deal about how Azure operates, particularly Sentinel and the Query Language on which Azure querying is based. Cloud technologies will only continue to grow and become more popular, so having a good understanding of one of the leading platforms will be invaluable as my career progresses. I have also completed training in Carbon Black and Splunk, two tools that are commonly used within the industry and will set me in good stead for my future career.
The work I have done has been interesting and challenging, despite not being able to work in customer environments due to the current situation with remote working¸ which otherwise would usually happen. One highlight so far has been creating my own virtual network on Azure to simulate real traffic and trigger alerts through this in Sentinel. I was able to use my network to show that this could be applied to customer environments, and hopefully this will be a positive impact of my time at ITC.
As mentioned before, due to the current situation, this placement has been different in the way I think everyone had imagined. Despite this, ITC has been fantastic at integrating myself and the other interns into the business and finding us meaningful and valuable work to do, which will mean we leave having not only gained experience ourselves but also hopefully having achieved something for the business.
I am uniquely placed, having completed internships both in the office and remotely, to say that the feel of the company has not changed in the 2-year gap between my times here and through this change in working style. The welcoming feeling was something that I really liked during my first placement, and so I was relieved to see that COVID had not dampened it in any way. The weekly quizzes provide a good break during the week, and I’m confident that we’ll see an intern in the top 5 every week!
Looking ahead to the final few weeks of the placement, I’m excited for a new challenge in creating a Threat Globe to visually show where threats are coming from. This is a very different task to what we have undertaken so far, and I’m looking forward to trying something new. I also aim to book and complete my AZ-900 Azure Fundamentals so that I can attain this certification during my time at the company. This would be a tangible achievement and something that will help further my career in cyber security, wherever it takes me.
Looking to the future, I’m not totally sure where I want to end up in my career, cyber security is such a large field with so many different paths that with such limited experience I would be foolish to choose a path for certain. I have however found that working in a SOC, particularly here at ITC, is something that I thoroughly enjoy. I find the investigative aspect very satisfying and the knowledge that I am making a difference is fulfilling.
