Hi, I Zara H, a recent Masters Graduate looking to break into the cybersec and networking industry. I have always been facinated with these areas since I first started learing about computing at school, with a key stand out being when I took part in an after school club revolving around cyber security and looking into Capture the Flag challeneges. Part of the alure is that these areas always felt like a puzzle to be solved, rewarding both exploration and creativity, and that working in these areas leads to constant learning and adpating. This kinda of view point very much inspired my how I program and work on projects, with a focus on more rigourous testing of soloutions, including focusing on edge cases, and when programing, trying to code defensivly to minimise potential issue later on.
After I left school, my intrest grew and grew, particularly into the Red Team side of cyber secuity, fuled by my participation in more CTF based challeneges through platforms such as PicoCTF. The facistation to this was lead by wanting to understand how something works and is implmented, and how this impacted what vulnerabilities existied, and more significantly, how these holes could be patched up effectively.
Another key interest in security came from watching and researching about speedrunning in games, watching how elements, inclduing some designed specifically to benefit or limit exploits, could be maniplualted by the gamer. I was both facinated in how these exploits were discovered and carried out, as well as what lenght and methods the developers would implement to prevent this. This was furthered through watching about the methods of copyright potection put in place, and how they were evadied both through hardware and software exploitation, with a particular facination through the crack protection of Spyro: The Year of The Dragon, and the challenege it preposed to those trying to break the copyright protection.
As part of this interest, I also began to discover another key side of the area of cyber security I deeply enjoy, which is digital forensics. This grew as I watched how games were data mined to capture key infomation such as unused assets, as well as the methods used to both hide and find hidden easter eggs. Seeing how these were done captivated me more, as I saw how digital fornsics, similar to Red Teaming, was another form of puzzle to solve, particularly one where you had to search and discover the first step.