Security Testing Journal Entry | w/e Friday March 3, 2023

Highlights for the week

We are officially in the red, people! It has been more than six months since my release from employment and the money is about to run out. There have been some promising leads that came and went. There were glimpses of hope that things were going to get better. The big tech companies are unloading people at an alarming rate. Remote positions are highly sought after and the competition isn't just with regional talent but global. I would be lying if I said I'm still cheery. The darkness of doubt and desperation is creeping in. 2am and I was flooded with all the horrors of all the dumb shit I've done since I can remember. The purge of my skeletons is in full swing.

In other news, I took a look at where I'm at with my goals and we are right on track with progress. Some areas need more attention (ie, networking), but overall its time to reign in the objectives and stay on the path. With learning about Wireshark and Mitre, things look promising.

What We Loved

1. Vacation was great. Got to see the Chichen Itza Mayan ruins, had some beach time, and great cruise.
2. Since being back, this week was heavy on the admin work and cleaning the old emails.

What We Learned

1. Keeping with the theme of cloud computing, the learning with Google Cloud continues.
2. Completed a Salesforce tutorial. There's one more about SF Dev that I need to finish.
3. AWS was another lesson completed last week.
4. For Automation, I set up the test to randomly select from a set of distinct items rather than having an explicit selection. Very cool!
5. Attended a meeting regarding Certifications. Their value and their worth.
6. I cloased out the week before vacation learning MITRE ATT&CK .. that is a huge win!
7. Learned a bunch with Wireshark. More on the way.
8. Testing with burpsuite continues at a great pace.

What We Longed For

1. Longing for work. I have maybe 1 month left before tapping into my retirement.
2. Network+ learnings will resume next week. Same for Security+
3. The theme next week will be to practice Vulnerability Assessment and put everything together. Pretend you're at work.
4. I reached out to a family member to discuss opportunity to shadow a 3rd Party Security consultant. Will revisit this next week.

What We Loathed

1. Linked.In never for lacking influencers all spouting the same "tips" on getting noticed. Mildly irritating at times.
2. Attended a virtual job fair that didn't have the kind of results I was looking for. Some good leads for Cybersecurity .. but I'm not there yet!!
3. Need to do a better job with my automation test scripting. Can't get too bogged down in a single test.