October is slowly fading away and with it any last rays of sunshine in Scotland, so I thought this is a perfect time to summarise my summer and fall. So many things have happened, full of both fun and work…
Internship at ZoneFox
I’ve completed a 10-week internship at Zonefox, an endpoint monitoring, insider threat mitigation software company. It was an intense time filled with all kinds of work from front end development to AWS traffic monitoring. It’s been amazing to see all the inner workings of a medium-sized company, the workflow and internal structures, all of the things I have never had the opportunity to experience before as my only cyber security related work experience was a scientific research internship at my university the summer before.
As I recently learned, I got nominated for the Best Cyber Talent in Scottish Cyber Awards for my work at Zonefox which I’m incredibly grateful for. I can’t wait for to see the team again for a fancy dinner at the awards gala in a couple of weeks.
AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
Building on the knowledge I have acquired while working on AWS projects at Zonefox, I realised I covered the syllabus for the first AWS certification, so I didn’t hesitate long and took the exam. This has left me with this beautiful shiny badge 🙂
Cyber Challenge UK Face to Face competition
Cyber Challenge UK is a series of competitions consisting of online preliminary rounds, face to face competitions and a yearly masterclass, where all qualified contestants meet to participate in a final round and a gala concluding a year of events.
After completing an online quiz based on a digital forensic analysis to be completed beforehand, I was invited for round 2 at Defence Academy in Shrivenham, England. It was a day full of surprises where we all had to play the role of police investigators, both detectives and techies, to solve a complex industrial blackmail case – more details about the day can be found in this blog post. I’m pretty happy to say I ended up qualifying for the final which will take place in November in London.
EMF Camp 2018
Not strictly connected to anything else I’m doing in my tech life, but I was lucky enough to get to go to EMF Camp this year – a magical biennial jamboree, bringing together makers, hackers and all kinds of artsy and techy people from all over the UK and Europe. Just take a look…
Apart from participating in all the amazingness, I was giving a workshop on NFC nail art (in the white t-shirt in the middle of that second photo, that’s me!). The number of people who showed up surpassed even the most optimistic of my expectations, and it soon became clear I will have to turn some people away, unfortunately. Anyway, I think everyone who did get to do their NFC manicure left quite happy with their blinking nails.
Honours project
With the beginning of a new academic year, my honours project work has commenced. I’m very excited to have chosen a very particular bit of Mac OS forensics to delve into – centralised thumbnail caches. The lack of extensive research on this topic is a bit intimidating, but it also does feel like a great motivation to know that if I manage to conduct a nice and methodological research, I can really bring some new knowledge to the table.
Edinburgh International Science Festival in 🇦🇪
For the second time this year, at the beginning of October I travelled to the UAE to deliver workshops for the Edinburgh International Science Festival in Dubai. This time I had the chance to do artificial intelligence, blockchain and car hacking, which, I have to say, these aren’t topics I have much to do with on a daily basis. That’s why it was a great experience to get to learn more about them first and then share the knowledge with the public in such a different setting than usual – sunny Dubai.
Ooft, that’s a lot! I’ll end this post with a shameless plug – as I’m graduating next summer, I’m looking for a job (preferably) in Scotland, so if you know of anything, please hit me up either at k.kieczkowska@gmail.com or on Twitter.
Kinga Kieczkowska // #tech #dfir #infosec 