My native curiosity made me delve into my academia rather quickly. In as early as my Third Semester, I received my first Online Certification from the Authority NPTEL, Indian Institute of Technology, Madras. It was titled “Design and Analysis of Algorithms", under Professor Madhav Mukund. This is what cemented my interest in writing code and applying data structures. One of the most treasured moments in the brief span of my Bachelor's was participating in the Smart India Hackathon, 2019. Notably, we were the only team selected from the Department of Information Technology at our college. Our project was titled "One-Click Research". It was a Problem marked in the 'complex' category of Problem Statements at SIH. The statement was to design a streamlined web-based portal to reduce the administrative overhead of submitting approving and publishing medical research, with other taxing aspects involved in the process. In the Bachelor’s project, my team is training a model that aims to detect the stage of Diabetic Retinopathy from just the Fundus Image of the eye of a patient. This project, titled “Diabetic Retinopathy Detection”, aims to expedite the process of detecting this ailment early, thereby reducing the requirement of the number of skilled professionals in rural areas, allowing for an accelerated course of treatment. It is being done using Neural Networks, Machine Learning, Computer Vision, coded in Python. As recently as this February, I participated in the Thadomal Shahani Hackathon, creating a semantics-based text search engine using Python, NLTK and Tensorflow. Our team was one of the top 15 teams and we were called to present our project at this hackathon.
The beginning of my pursuit in Cybersecurity was when I started my first course “Introduction to Cybersecurity for Business” from University of Colorado System, through Coursera, in my early Third Semester and, thoroughly enthralled by the concepts, I went on to complete all the other remaining courses in the Specialization “Cybersecurity for Business”, namely “Cyber Threats and Attack Vectors”, “Detecting and Mitigating Threats and Cyber Attacks” and “Proactive Computer Security”, in a mere 35 days. At my first Internship at BUDSTA Analytics & Insights, Pvt. Ltd., under Mr. Lester Fernandes, Managing Director & CEO, during my Fifth Semester, we developed a project titled “Face Recognition Based Security Clearance”, using Computer Vision, Python and Amazon Web Services. At my second internship, at Centrum Group, under personal guidance of Mr. Rajesh Deshpande, the Vice President of Information Technology, I gained insight into security in a Corporate structure, professional-grade firewalls, and the methods of segmentation in corporate networks, Cloud-based solutions in corporations, security systems on cloud-based infrastructure and their setup and configuration. My project was “Vulnerability assessment of Centrum UAT environment” using Nessus, where I got the opportunity to analyze the in-depth working of the systems, services, configurations as well as the technique of creating a detailed assessment report. The project for the subject, Enterprise Network Design, in the Seventh Semester, had us design an enterprise-grade network for a news channel media company, including the network devices used, servers required, and equipment, which gave us a more comprehensive perception of corporate network design.
The main advantage of the course “Cybersecurity for Business” at Coursera was the plethora of mini-projects at the end of each of the individual courses, each involving different aspects of security. The most notable one of these projects was in the course “Proactive Computer Security” titled “Mutillidae”. In this purposely vulnerable hosted web application, I managed to exploit three security controls as well as successfully solve the ‘capture-the-flag’ challenge. This furthered my interest in penetration testing. Other projects included analyzing systems for threat vectors as well as case studies for both analyzing reasons for breaches and incident response strategies. To further this newly gained interest, I’ve also been actively solving challenges posted by an open-source vulnerable Web Application called “OWASP Juice Shop”, which gives a clear set of goals and targets as you go about in your testing process. I’m learning the usage of various tool stacks and automation and cracking. I have also learnt usage of tools such as Metasploit and N-map for network and OS level vulnerability detection and exploitation, and practiced the implementation of various modules on purposely vulnerable operating systems through the third course of this Coursera Specialization, as well as the setup of various defences like Intrusion Detection Systems, Prevention Systems, Firewalls, and misdirection systems like honeypots.