A collection of things I've worked on/achieved:
When I was a kid, my Dad was always interested in computers & was super interested in seeing how they worked. He was so interested in fact, that he spent way more money than was responsible on a Gateway Destination 2000 PCTV. At the time, this was the tip of the spear as far as hardware went. Some of my first memories are of him tinkering with it, trying to squeeze out the most performance, installing expansion cards, etc. He definitely passed the bug onto me & I was hooked.
Throughout high school, I was always tinkering with something. My school had Macbooks that were distributed to students & I would use Wine to wrap Windows applications so that they could run on MacOS (usually games). I wasn't aware of security in the way that I am today & I thought the only thing I could have done for work was programming. I misunderstood how programming worked & I assumed you needed to be a mathemetician to write code. I gave up on it & went to nursing school.
Nursing school didn't work out & I joiend the Air Force as a System Administrator. My first assignment was joint, so I didn't actually do my job - I ended up traveling as a network engineer. From there, I moved to a SOC & the bug was caught all over again. Just triaging alerts to me was so cool, little did I know the rabbit hole would deepen. When I began learning incident response, it really took hold. It felt so cool to be like a detective, figuring out what actors were doing on networks & being able to track them & mitigate the damage.
Since then, I've worked as a Malware Analyst, Security Engineer, and currently I am a Solutions Architect - building environments for clients to test the latest & greatest security tools. I love to play CTFs & fancy myself pretty good at them.
CTF Experience:
When I was within the Government space, I placed within the top 5 multiple times for internal competitions - ranging from Cryptography to Exploitation.
I've played multiple internal CTFs with my current company - placing first in two of them.
I've been a player in the National Cyber League (NCL) for two seasons:
My first season I was able to place 39th out of 602 students in the Experienced Bracket & 19th overall at SANS Technology Institute in the individual game. In the team game, my team was able to complete all challenges with 98% accuracy, placed 3rd in the experienced bracket & 1st overall at SANS. Being this was my first season, I learned a lot & teamed up with some great folks - I solved all Scanning & Recon challenges solo & helped solve a variety of the other challenges.
In the most recent season of NCL that just wrapped, I placed 41st in the experienced bracket & 15th overall at SANS - I was also able to solve more challenges & with almost 20% higher accuracy. In the Team Game, my team placed 32nd in the experienced bracket & 9th overall at SANS. This season, I was able to solo a lot more of the challenges. I solo'd most of the Cryptography challenges, as well as Open-Source Intelligence, Forensics, and Network Traffic Analysis. I learned even more this season & cannot wait to continue my CTF journey.