Still in the work
Since April 2023 I have worked as a senior cybersecurity engineer and information security expert in the private sector. My clients are large organisations with several operating companies and sites in many countries. The work is hands-on: I design the security, build it and keep it running.
Some of what I have built in that time:
- A vulnerability management service in Tenable that scans more than 15,000 assets and 2,000 cloud assets automatically. Vulnerability management means finding the known weaknesses in every system, ranking them and getting them fixed.
- A managed firewall service for more than 200 firewalls at over 100 industrial sites around the world.
- An attack surface management program. The attack surface is everything an organisation exposes to the internet. Outside rating services grade it, and this organisation moved from a D grade to an A.
- Micro-segmentation across more than 9,000 assets: splitting a network into small zones, so an attacker who gets in cannot move freely. Movement between zones fell by 90%, and false alarms by 95%.
- Security work for ISO 27001, SOC 2, DORA and SEC audits, including a MasterCard RiskRecon assessment, and business continuity and disaster recovery tests.
The tools I work with now include Check Point, Palo Alto and Fortinet firewalls, Splunk, Microsoft Sentinel, Tenable, Qualys, Zscaler, Nozomi and Claroty, Kubernetes and OpenShift, and automation with Ansible and n8n.
When Recon describes cyber work, it describes work I do now. Many of the tools and tasks in the job adverts you read in Part 4 are ones I work with.
From a Navy uniform to civilian cybersecurity
For twelve years I wore a Romanian Navy officer’s uniform. From 2011 to 2016 I was the Information Security Officer at Navy Headquarters. I set security standards for the whole organisation and inspected against them, ran compliance and audit work, built and trained incident response teams, kept the business continuity and disaster recovery plans, and ran security awareness training.
On paper, everything looked right. Inside, I was moving further from the life I wanted. In October 2015 I survived the Colectiv fire in Romania, where 65 people died. A year later I left the Navy.
Starting again, on purpose
I made the move the hard way. From 2016 to 2019 I took four civilian roles, one after another, each in a different kind of security work, to learn the field from the inside:
- Cegeka Romania, 14 months: network and security engineering. Building security infrastructure from several vendors, load balancers and VPNs.
- SecureWorks, 6 months: threat intelligence and incident response. Connecting alerts from different security tools, and analysing malware.
- Oracle, 6 months: enterprise security infrastructure. A global estate of firewalls, web gateways and remote access.
- Reliance ACSN, United Kingdom, 6 months: managed security services. Leading the team that ran security for client companies, and directing their incident response.
That is why Recon shows you ten career domains before you choose one. I have worked in several of them, and they are different jobs. I also know what a move into cyber work costs, because I made one.
Inside large security teams
In 2019 I joined Honeywell as a network consultant, working on firewalls and network security from six vendors.
In 2020 I moved to ING Romania, a bank. As Senior Security Infrastructure Engineer I ran the bank’s security technology: web application firewalls, intrusion prevention, DDoS protection, network access control, endpoint security and vulnerability management. In 2021 I became an Information Security Officer there, and redesigned how the bank handles cybersecurity incidents: the people, the policies, the procedures and the tools.
Later in 2021 I went back to Honeywell as a cybersecurity architect and engineer, and from 2022 as Senior Advanced Cybersecurity Architect / Engineer. I designed the network security behind managed security services for more than 300 customers in operational technology (OT): the systems that run factories, plants and other physical processes. I automated much of the routine work with Ansible, GitLab and Jenkins, which cut the manual workload by 70%.
At Honeywell I also built mentorship and internal training programs, and mentored interns. Several of the people who recommend my work on the home page came through them.
Qualifications
I hold the CISSP and the CISM, and I am a certified career coach. My other certifications:
- Associate C|CISO
- CompTIA Security+
- Palo Alto Networks Certified Network Security Engineer (PCNSE)
- Check Point Certified Security Expert (CCSE)
- Cisco CCNA Routing and Switching, CCNA Security, CCNA CyberOps and CCNP TSHOOT
- Cisco Certified Specialist: Enterprise Advanced Infrastructure Implementation
- Zscaler Certified Cloud Administrator: Internet Access (ZCCA-IA)
- Microsoft Certified: Azure Fundamentals
- Software Security Practitioner: Software Architect
- CNSS Information Systems Security (INFOSEC) Professional (4011)
I studied naval engineering at the Naval Academy “Mircea cel Batran” in Constanta, banks and finance at Ovidius University in Constanta, and information security management at the Regional Department of Defense Resources Management Studies in Brasov.
What I can bring to your decision
I can tell you what I have seen. Where I am giving you an opinion rather than experience, I say so. The decision stays with you.
I am not a recruiter or a hiring manager at the company you want to work for. I cannot promise a job, a salary or a date.
Why the decision comes first
I built Recon so you can look at the work, the market and your own constraints before you pay for training. Access is the paid program for choosing a direction and planning the move.