For the third fifty hours of my internship, which could otherwise be referred to as the first one hundred and fifty hours of my internship, I continued with some of the previous projects I had been working on, such as working on and nearly completing private company network site survey save for some physical location information regarding each of the devices, as well as began and finished smaller projects to aid the business in the meantime. The spreadsheet I was working on includes where each device is linked to the network logically, as in what is connected through wires and what is wirelessly connected and as I have finished this portion of the spreadsheet the final bit of my site survey is consisting of me creating a network diagram visualizing the logical set up of the information I learned while conducting my site survey, as well as creating a physical diagram with information pertaining to the locations of the different devices on the network through a floorplan of the small company’s building.

            Aside from progress on the aforementioned spreadsheet, I was also instructed to widen my scope on the investigation of AI within cybersecurity and create a comprehensive ranking of a few different notable onsite AI appliances worth looking into for different companies, with my mentor taking an interest in the Beelink EQR6 due to it’s budget similarities to the Mac Mini, which has since increased in price nearly four hundred dollars from the time I had finished putting the list together to when we reviewed the difference appliances as well as becoming extremely hard to acquire as its versatility has brought on high consumer demand. Similarly, in reference to investigating AI appliances that would best aide small businesses, I also had to investigate different AI applications commonly used and rank them on how useful they are and what is their best use cases, as well as define what the benefits of different tiers the AI applications provided to the user, including but not limited to the free tier to tiers around one hundred dollars per month.

            One my other main projects recently was a bit more necessary for the organization as, to go into detail without going into too much detail, Auspex Technologies works with the Department of Defense in securing information and making certain that the information that needs to be available is available, because of new guidelines and certifications coming into order, one of my assignments was to research into said certifications and summarize the guideline information and what changes the company would need to look into and follow in order to get the required certifications. Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certifications or CMMC have multiple levels of certifications needing a self-assessment or third-party assessment depending on the information being stored by the contractor or sub-contractor and if it’s considered a threat to national security, with level 1 requiring around seventeen guidelines to be fulfilled and a level 2 certification requiring over one-hundred and ten guidelines to be fulfilled.

            I believe one of the major revelations that my internship helped convey to me was not how large of a matter information security is, as I believe I had a good grasp of that from classes and even from prior experience and simply logic, but rather how much pressure is on the individuals in the field to ratify the steps taken to ensure that stored information is kept private. I believe that earlier in my internship reading through the STIGs and looking into the CMMC levels of certification were among the most effective in proving that point to me. There is a larger sense of responsibility now when I think about the cybersecurity field and the struggle to keep information that should be private or only disclosed to relevant individuals truly confidential.