hamsterico

No more Cybersecurity Certifications

hmstk — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 06:14:27 GMT

Since I last wrote about my personal experience in Cybersecurity, I wasn't making any real progress. Getting one certification after another certification while spending lots of hours, it's not worth the time and didn't help me to create actual skills or even demonstrate it.

The goal for this article is to change the mentality where many Infosec Influencers are telling you to do: "get a certificate and you will get hired!"

The reality of the situation while Cybersecurity Certifications are a great way to get you introduced to concepts of it and others, it doesn't expose or even make you to do make small projects. The bigger picture is that your personal portfolio is what makes a difference, but the issue is that many of the tools that are out of there are already completed. That doesn't mean that you are not going to use them to your own benefit.

The post is just a starting point on things that I will be doing on a weekly basis, short projects on my own AWS and perhaps in another cloud environment if it's not costly, the goal is to be able to showcase the things that I'm willing to work on.

My idea is to always do something to stay motivated and have a positive mindset of trying stuff while breaking them (hopefully not on AWS credit usage)

Entering the Security Operations Center

hmstk — Sun, 02 Feb 2025 23:15:40 GMT

Article from November 21, 2020:

After the short experience in Software Development, I took another challenge. Yes, the opportunity of reaching to a new path of Information Security that I’ve always wanted to be part of. As I did with the brief blog of SoftDev now is the time of my first month at SOC:

The first day, I was very nervous with lots of expectations of what I’m going to do. I was aware that I was going to work with SIEMs, AVs consoles, and bunch tools. As, I always do, I arrived very early to the building. I didn’t spend too much time waiting for my introduction to the whole company.

After the introduction, I signed the contracts for my benefits and responsibilities. Also for the famous NDAs that I always hear of some Security Researchers. Then, the moment I was waiting for… Get to the SOC, and there it was:

Many screens showing SIEMs, status websites uptime, support tickets, current threats, and more. I felt that I was in the place I always wanted to work. At first, I stared at the monitors seeing how the events were updating each minute. Support team were preparing my equipment and installing the necessary tools.

Then, we started the necessary training material for getting prepared. The instructor also taught us the many internal tools of the company. After receiving the material, I got a huge screen for better visibility of the tools. Also, because the laptop screen is kinda small compared to a big screen.

I’ve mentioned the commodities so far, and you are wondering: where’s the security? ISO 27001 is the way to go. The standard defines the what, and whatnot. It’s very flexible to meet all the security companies requirements. No photos, no backpacks, no cup of coffee nearby your equipment. For others felt very repressive, for me its general rules of a company. I’ve worked before on a call center and it was worse compared to this.

Let’s get technical

Many miscomprehend the generalities of the ISO 27001. It is not a standard that you need to meet every rule. What you need is establish context, scope, and objectives. The standard will adapt to your needs, and I will leave this topic for another day.

What about Confidentiality, Integrity and Availability? The CIA triad is everywhere, and many times Confidentiality takes a bigger importance. Sometimes is Availability and other times is Integrity. It will depend on the goal of the client or the process. In the company manual mentions that protecting the triad is a goal that the SOC Analyst needs to achieve.

SIEMs? OK now first thing. There lots of logs, everywhere. For once I’m glad these tools exist, because it would be a daunting task of collecting them all day long. Not only of collecting is hard, but making the proper cleanup is even worse. The data doesn’t come in an spreadsheet, with nice ordered columns, or with dynamic tables. It comes in the form of a long string.

A simple example of logs:

92.168.72.177 - - [22/Dec/2002:23:32:15 -0400] “GET /style.css HTTP/1.1” 200 4138 www.yahoo.com ”https://www.yahoo.com/index.html” “Mozilla/5.0 (Windows…” ”-”

192.168.72.177 - - [22/Dec/2002:23:32:16 -0400] “GET /js/ads.js HTTP/1.1” 200 10229 www.yahoo.com ”http://www.search.com/index.html” “Mozilla/5.0 (Windows…” ”-”

192.168.72.177 - - [22/Dec/2002:23:32:19 -0400] “GET /search.php HTTP/1.1” 400 1997 www.yahoo.com ”-” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; …)” ”-”

64.242.88.10 - - [07/Mar/2004:16:45:56 -0800] “GET /twiki/bin/attach/Main/PostfixCommands HTTP/1.1” 401 12846

64.242.88.10 - - [07/Mar/2004:16:47:12 -0800] “GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1” 200 68

You might think: “OK I can put the dates in a column and setup the other request in another”, that will take too much time. SIEMs ease the collection and enrichment of the logs to give relevant information. It can show if an event is suspicious or needs further investigation. It makes pivoting easier. Because you can filter suspicious IP address to other events that are relevant.

What I’m trying to say is that for a SOC Analyst, time is gold. Efficiency is imperative, meaning if you can ease any process, it will help you to take down other events. Tools will become your allies and you will depend of them. That’s why when the SIEMs starts to slow down is PANIC!

I’m enjoying my time at the Security Operations Center, and I will discuss about more topics in the future.

Wait, where did the "Hello World" go?

hmstk — Sun, 02 Feb 2025 23:09:46 GMT

This an article from September 10, 2020: (As always I’m keeping it with no edits)

It’s the third month that I’ve been working at CodeExitos as a Software Developer. It’s the first job that is related to my career, meaning that every single hour of learning and learning finally would lead me to success, right!? I mean finally I’m here and I’m coding several lines of code that displays an image or a text or a button, so no more hurdles, right? Well, I’m going to share the experience in these three months.

Welcome to Tech. Inc

Ah, receiving that email that you were waiting for months, if not months probably a year, with the subject: Job Offer. It’s finally over, no more LinkedIn daily search, no more learning job interview tips, no more practicing for another interview and dressing up for a formal or a wedding. The long journey of the job hunting is now concluding with a happy ending and even the credits are showing up.

For me it was an euphoric moment, but then many thoughts were rambling in my head about, what to do with my first paycheck, should I write a blog post (like this one) telling how I got here, what I should be learning right now before my first day, and the most important, what is going to happen on my first day at my new job? At work I finished speaking with my boss and I thought: “Alright time to go to rest a bit”. Meanwhile at work they were setting up the accounts, permissions, meetings, and meetings. Meetings? I’ve got a new meeting, after the accepting the contract, to tell me about the workflow, the tools, and more.

My first reaction was: “ALERT! Panic! Wait I’m not yet mentally prepared!” Although when you accept that contract you are now ready. The meeting started, my boss was explaining about the workflow, where to find information related to the company, and about the project that I’m going to work for the following months. I’m glad that I know some of the tools for the design and for the teamwork collaboration, although as soon I started to see the many things that I need to achieve in the following weeks, I started to panic! The meeting ended, they share many articles to set up my development environment and helped me during the process of installation. At this moment, I took the decision of learning everything of this development and practice during the weekend (I accepted the job on Friday).

“Hello World”?

(Source of image)

Yes, this block of code is just to print a “Hello World” on the screen. I’m exaggerating on the statement because that’s what I was seeing the first day at job with the many lines of code. There were many things I could recognize that I was confident with, but that was the 20% of the entire project. What’s Redux? What’s Amplify? Why I’m having null errors? What in the world is a Saga? I don’t get it, what do I do? Sprint planning? Alright Git, what do you mean by CR? PR? Where I am? I’m not going to technicalities because it’s not the point of the post but rather you might get the picture. I was seeing the same way that long block of code that was just printing “Hello World”. I was completely lost, during the first week my performance was very low. My coworker told me: “Do you need help?” and we regularly made some meetings for pair programming, but I was lacking something, very important for any job.

S.O.S! I’m Sinking in The Tar Pit

Yes, of course, I need help to understand all these new tools, new concepts, etc. Easy, right? Learn everything read and read, try some stuff, google it, and perhaps do some stack overflow. But, what do you do when the code isn’t the same as that question in StackOverflow? How do you understand someone else’s code?

Exactly you go and you ask for help! Even though the solution was simple, my problem is to make the first step and asking it when I’m stuck. Frederick Brooks describes in his essay The Mythical Month Man: “…programming has over the past decade been such a tar pit, and many great and powerful beasts have thrashed violently in it.” In other words, programming can become a tar pit, where the more you fight it, the deeper you sink. Happens many times, as the project grows, changes on requirements, bugs that arises, and many other woes of programming that can demotivate any programmer, and even more if you are starting working.

Asking for help is not optional, is imperative. For me that I’m quite shy and a little prideful, it’s such a difficult task, because of these thoughts in my head:

“What if they think that I’m really dumb for asking this question and not getting the solution by myself?”
No, maybe there are busy and I’m going to bother them.

Both are dangerous and bad thoughts. They hindered my learning process of the workflow and I struggled with many codes of block that I could simply ask what it was doing and why it was the best way to approach it. As any other first job, you want to be exceptional, innovative and helpful, but you reach the challenges and struggle to put aside your expectations and ask for the help you need. Communication, communication, communication, can really help to avoid big troubles. If not, you can see what happened at Tower of Babel.

Hello World (June 18, 2020)

hmstk — Sun, 02 Feb 2025 23:03:46 GMT

This a previous article from June 18 of 2020:

I’ve thinking a lot about what should I say on my first post. It’s very tempting to do “Hello World” and that’s it.

It leaves me with a sense of just emptiness for me. So I’m going to try my best to leave a few details about my journey to this point. To be fair, I don’t want to put Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua.

Doubt

Since 2018, I had a big problem what do I do with my future career once I step out of college? Should I apply for a job? Should I go and get my masters degree? If I get a masters should I go with Computer Science and hope that some prestigious institution hire me for research work or do put my effort in another specialty that businesses would appreciate more than just a single degree?

Education FTW!

For my worst reaction, it has been a nightmare of highs and downs. After I graduated from college I took a trip with my parents to D.C. and I was telling them about my future plans. Why? Because I’m close to my parents and they have given me good advice.

I told them that I was interested of keep studying, because for me studying has been a wonderful journey. You do research on a specific topic, you learn the basic concepts, you review the materials before the test, then you hope for the best that everything that you put on the test will be alright. Perhaps my vision of study is not best and perhaps is just mediocre term for education. I always thought that with good education and good effort you will achieve good results. I guess is just something that everyone’s parents program in your brain to be successful.

I’m not trying to say that education is bad, but rather education without putting into practice is not enough. It doesn’t matter if you learn a lot of stuff, if you don’t apply the knowledge you will not learn where to put it. Let me rephrase it, knowledge without practice is just knowledge. Knowledge is good, you think you know something that others don’t, you know that A is A. The problem starts when you start thinking “OK what do I do with A?“.

Can “A” help others?

Of course A can be helpful for many people. A is there just to be applied to a big problem and make it effective. Although the problem is that where do you get the opportunity to apply the knowledge that just learned? Many career orientations would say: “Go out there and start putting yourself as a practitioner, freelance or intern even if it doesn’t pay nothing but you will not lose anything, instead you will get experience”. I wish I could’ve listen to the advice.

Ah experience, the word that not only infuriates me, but just listening or reading it will get on my nerves, right now. Experience is after you applied A for a problem you know that either will work or won’t. Knowledge will only tell you that you can do it but doesn’t guarantee that it will have a positive impact. Experience will tell you that it will work but you need to know where to put A.

Even my own explanations doesn’t make sense for you, but what I’m trying to say is that both knowledge and experience is important. It doesn’t matter if you put a lot in only one. You need a balance between both.

Oh you have knowledge that’s great BUT have you worked on this before?

Here it comes the problem where I get stuck:

“3 years” “5 years” “10 years” “You must be dead and reincarnate to get this job”

Maybe I’m exaggerating on the matter, but believe me that this all I hear when applying. Even before of the masters I did apply to many companies but then my face was slapped by EXPERIENCE. For me it’s unfair that for entry level jobs need to have experience? What’s this? It’s supposed to be ENTRY not MID-Level. Am I misunderstanding the naming?

What? Career orientation never told about these nonsensical topics. But let’s leave out my job hunt rant aside. It’s not the scope of this hello world, but I’m trying my best to describe the journey.

You mentioned a Masters?

Back to the story, for me I chose to keep researching. I really thought that opportunities would arise with a degree that not many people in my country can get it. I imagined that many companies and universities would just see my future curriculum and say: “I need to meet this guy”.

I knew when I took a Computer Security seminar that my journey needed to take a high turn. Security huh? Not many people know about this. I mean in my country there are not many reports of big hacking, in fact, we don’t care. The cyber crime punishment were added to Guatemala’s Criminal Code in 1999, great isn’t? (https://www.oas.org/es/sla/ddi/docs/G6%20Codigo%20Penal%20de%20Guatemala.pdf)

But it never reflected to known cases because it’s just that Law. It doesn’t state that companies or even the same state needed security, their security was a punishment, if they knew who was responsible. Cyber crime acts exactly like that, leaving no traces. I thought that perhaps there is a opportunity of enter this field because there were not many experts in the area in my country, also because there was a lack of security. Also because I was interested in protecting important assets, many people talks about the “hackers” and that’s fine, although they forget the other side of the ones protecting their important data or even their accessibility to technology.

I took the challenge I want to search for something about security. I want to breath security, I want to see it, please just give me anything. There it was, a big opportunity, Scholarship for Cybersecurity in Spain. I was so excited and I immediately started to apply. I got into the interviews, I did my best and I finally got it. I started to think, this is my big chance. I can do it, there is nothing that can stop me from my big dream.

I went to Spain and spent one year, I learned about Information Security, Hacking, Threat Analysis, Risk Management, etc. I thought that the world was there to be eaten. All of my classmates where top students from all over the world, many who I respect till this day and there are doing their best in their current job. I missed them a lot.

Homecoming

In Kendrick Lamar’s - Momma there is a lyric who always made me think about what it would felt my return to my home:

I know how people work I know the price of life, I’m knowin’ how much it’s worth I know what I know and I know it well not to ever forget Until I realized I didn’t know s*it The day I came home

The day I took the plane to return to my home, I keep hearing this song at the airport and thought: “This is it, this is the moment I’ve been waiting. I’ve no longer a simple Bachelor Computer Science. Now I’m a Cybersecurity expert, I know about security, it’s the big day”

The first day that I’ve returned to my home I was welcomed by my family and they noticed how much I’ve been struggling to reach a new goal. Even I was welcomed with a new family member, a pug. Sorry, I’m a big fan of pugs.

Well, after a week of resting I decided know is the time for job hunting. But you might know about the result after hearing my previous rant.

Picking up the pieces

I was devastated, I thought that everything that I’ve learned it meant nothing, that education was worthless. I got a bunch of cheering messages from my friends who I really thank for being there in the worst moments. My family were supportive till this day and continue to cheer me up. I don’t where I would be without my family and friends.

I put every feeling of frustration away and thought: “I’m not going to let end up like this. I need to change, I need to create that experience”

Therefore, I knew that I wasn’t going to let myself be defeated. Let’s create something that will be significant. I took courses in another area that I knew it was going to be the daily necessity of many around my country, Web Development.

I took some online courses at Udemy and thought: “Well maybe here is the big opportunity that I need”. I think many times looking at my CV there was nothing that I can show to future employers. They just saw knowledge but nothing concrete. This is why I immediately thought about a personal blog for putting everything that I’ve worked on or that I’m working on.

Should I just make a personal blog about my personal experiences? Should I make it only about technology and how to achieve something? Personally I’m trying to make A be useful to someone just like me or that has the same experience.

Does anyone knows how to send this back in time so myself from the past can read it?

Anyways, Hello World and Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua.