Katie Avalo
Professor Duvall

Cybersecurity Internship

01 August 2025

Reflective Paper

These last fifty hours have been very successful. The overall project of my internship was to harden an Amazon EC2 instance running Amazon Linux. I had only ever used Kali Linux. The setup for the instance was difficult because he was the authorized user over the instances for the company and he had me create my account through his portfolio. One of the challenges I faced was making my account, giving myself certain privileges, and adjusting configurations without messing with anyone else’s account.

Once I was able to set up the account for myself, I had to set up the instance. In order to access the instance I had to open specific ports and enable ssh. I also had to make sure I had the right keys in order to use ssh. Unfortunately, I had created the instance on a different laptop and the key had downloaded on my employer’s laptop and not on mine. When I brought up this problem to him, he introduced me to S3 buckets. Through the use of the bucket, I was able to upload this key making it accessible to me whenever I was using my AWS account.

I was now able to enter my instance. With the use of CIS Benchmarks guide to hardening Amazon Linux, I was able to rise my security audit score on Lynis from 64 to an 80 with just a few amount of configurations.