Working onsite in cybersecurity

Working onsite in cybersecurity

Even if the pandemic situation is still present in our daily lives, cybersecurity doesn’t have to stop. And sometimes working in this field requires engineers to travel to the client’s location to work.

There are many stereotypes when it comes to cybersecurity, often cybersecurity engineers are associated with hackers, or dark figures wearing hoodies and spending all of their time working in front of a screen. In this article, Ovidiu, one of our cyber engineers is talking about his journey working onsite into two different continents in the same month.

“Being a security engineer sometimes implies working on projects that require onsite presence. I would like to present my adventure to you working on two projects, this being my first time experiencing going onsite.

“Home sweet Chicago”

Going to the heart of the city that laid the roots for blues was an incredible event. The first work assessment was regarding devices that provide Internet to aviation and navigation fields and infotainment devices for line flights.

On my first day on American soil, I was astounded by the skyscrapers. After I got back to reality, I went to a lab prepared by an airline company that had all these devices ready for penetration testing. I had a brief presentation of the custom functionalities to start the audit.

The whole project took one week to complete and besides the fact that I learned a lot of new technical skills, it also helped me to improve my communication with the clients and to understand what are the key features that they are looking for at a security audit.

The next day after the report was delivered to the client, I went to my family friend in South Bend for a few days to explore the beauty of that country more in-depth. We went together to visit the huge campus of Notre Dame University, where Jon Bon Jovi’s son has studied, and to see Lake Michigan’s shore in South Haven.

After staying a few days in Indiana, I went to New York City by plane for a week. Being a huge jazz and hip-hop head, this city went straight to my heart and I couldn’t wait to explore all five boroughs. This week would’ve been a great gratification after a week of work. After visiting everything that I had on my list in Chicago and NYC, I went back to Cluj-Napoca with a bag full of new experiences and learned skills.

Dubai

After a week back in Romania, a new journey would be announced – a project in Dubai.

This project involved assessing a vault from a bank both from a physical security point of view but also performing a pentest on the web application that managed that vault. The first thing that stood out on the first day of working with the people from Dubai was how kind and relaxed they were with us.

Firstly, the clients went with us through the whole process that needed to be tested and we made our setup needed for this assessment. We started with the physical assessment that implied pick locking all the doors and the devices that had a lock. Then, we started to test the electromagnetic doors for backdoors and potential bypasses in the building. In the following days, we started the pentest process for the web application that manages the vault so we end up finding all the vulnerabilities from the entire picture of the process.

In conclusion, cybersecurity engineers are not always behind a monitor, this job also implies social skills and the knowledge of making the clients satisfied with quality work done onsite. These two projects extended my horizon of skills and I’m very glad that I met lots of wonderful people during them.

Thanks to my team for allowing me to have these amazing experiences!”