Welcome
Welcome
I started working in Cybersecurity in 2021 after a long flirtation with the industry courtesy of my friend Scott McGready.
I'd been working as a policy fraud investigator for a UK Insurer for eight years and had met Scott through his work on the Take Five campaign which helped me to perceive strategies to use with fraud victims. For a long time however Scott insisted that I should dip my toe in the cyber world he inhabited which was a little different to fraud but carried many similarities.
In 2020, I decided the role I was in was no longer for me, and I would look for a change. I didn't see lockdown coming with my last day in insurance being two weeks before the world closed up for quite some time. I did however get a year of excellent time being dad.
The pandemic was a challenging time for us all and during it I got to meet new friends during the infamous InfoSecHappyHour Friday night Zoom calls.
It was that summer I discovered the TraceLabs SearchParty CTF's which I completed my first one with the excellent folk at HackSouth, a South African based community who were happy to take in a stray Irishman for a few hours.
I got to virtually goon at BsidesNewcastle that year at last minute which was interesting!
Something must have clicked between me and the industry though, as I ended up speaking (and gooning) at BeerCon2 about the link between databreaches and Insurance Fraud
In December 2020, I founded the Adorably Persistent Team CTF Team with Scott and our friend Lennaert Oudshoorn. We've grown out this community and try to take part in CTF's time permitting, trying to help people engage with CTF's rather than being afraid of the challenges.
One of my mentors for the Beercon2 talk was David McKenzie who agreed with Scott that I should find my way into a role somewhere in the industry. A few months later ,I got sent a profile for a SOC Analyst opening at Quorum Cyber where I'd get the chance to work with him. Couple of "Make sure Ger's not evil" interviews later with some unbiased staff and I started my career in March 2021.
In May 2022, I started as a SOC Engineer at Quorum putting my time as an analyst to use tuning out false positives and building automations for the rest of the team.