Nicholas Malley

CYSE 368

19 October 2023

Reflection 2

            During the second week of my internship for Tower Federal Credit Union’s information security department, I was assigned the task of creating playbooks for the different operations and processes of our department. The project specifically aimed to heighten my understanding of the different programs used daily. The playbook is also intended to provide a high level overview to TFCU’s third party vendors that are initializing a plan of a Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) system.

            In the next coming days, it was my responsibility to reach out to the information owners to learn the ins and outs of the targeted process. In that time, I spoke to four different people, Craig White about Tenable Security Center and Cisco Email Security Appliance, Brad Wojcicki about Vulnerability Management, and lastly Andrew Kenny and Matt S. about Cisco Umbrella.

            Moreover, all four listed programs/processes utilize vendor developed resources but are tower hosted. So many man hours are contributed to the use and operation of the listed programs/processes. The implementation of SOAR could be beneficial by relieving manual duties and employing automation. Therefore, I was tasked to creating a simplified version of the different processes that could be automated.

            In summary, my second week was another week of added learning. It required a lot of concentration and attention to detail which allowed me to think outside of the box. I was given the opportunity to add or remove different paths and processes as I saw fit because it was draft. That allowed me the freedom and flexibility to try different things and really tested my knowledge. In all, the second week was full of trial and error which I think is great for the development of a young professional.