I was a security operations intern at Vertiv in Westerville, Ohio. I primarily worked on cleaning up the company’s regional firewalls with two other interns which entailed disabling/deleting unused rules, converting from port-based to application-based rules, and investigating traffic logs to determine whether rules should be altered. I also primarily worked on security operations’ runbooks and had meetings with application owners from around the globe.
I gained a lot of insight and advice of the tech industry from my knowledgeable supervisor, Mike. He also has many interesting experiences and stories, and I enjoyed hearing about them over the course of my internship. I was also unsure of what companies I should work at for the first few years of my career, and Mike suggested many, along with his reasoning, which made me feel less directionless.
I also learned that academics lay the foundation of my education, while real experience does the rest. It was also interesting to interact with a global security operations team and learn of differing security concerns in Europe and Asia. Lastly, I was able to obtain a Security+ certification which vastly expanded my knowledge of security.
My interactions with Mike allowed me to hear of his many experiences and to ask him any questions I had, work-related or not. Mike is also a big part of how me and the other two interns are able to continue working at Vertiv part-time in the fall. Along with that, he got us free tickets to a security conference in September called BSides Columbus which I am excited to attend as it is my first security conference.
I also had another mentor, Charette, who was the only other woman on the security operations team. She told me how important getting the Security+ certification was as a first step in my cybersecurity career, and shared many valuable resources with me to help me prepare and I ended up passing because of those resources. She also shared events that were happening around Columbus, specifically those hosted by women in tech and women in cybersecurity groups, so that I can get more involved in the community.
My interactions with the other two interns gave me more experience with working together on a team, and it was the first time I worked on a team in a professional setting aside from school. And, as previously mentioned, interacting with global security operations team members was interesting and insightful.
Specifically for the Security+ certification, it will advance my career because I am more likely to get interviews/hired and paid more. My studies in preparation for it also expanded my knowledge and led me to develop more specific interests in security (malware, quantum computing, machine learning, and pentesting), whereas before I was unsure of what exactly my interests were. I was also able to connect things I was learning in my studies to experiences and knowledge I gained on the job. I’ve also been wanting to get more involved in the security community, and Mike and Charette pointed me in the right direction with different conferences and events. As for the internship itself, I learned much about how different departments in a company interact with each other, different tools used by secops such as host/network-hardening/management, and the function of IT.