Hello!
For this assignment, I have a challenge essay for anyone interested.
I have to write about my internship experience this summer. For obvious reasons, I won’t share my company, but for the essay, you can say the company was “PWC” and that I was a cybersecurity intern.
I have also included another screenshot that shows what we did on a week-to-week basis. I will provide details for each week so you have some content to work with.
Week 1 (May 20th) Orientation and Setup: This week was pretty easy and light by meeting everyone, and going over our background such as grade, major, and interest. Then we went over more important items such as the employee handbook, expectations, onboarding process, and completing any outstanding forms. To get the ball rolling, we started downloading what we needed for the duration of the internship. This included downloading VMware Fusion and Microsoft Remote Desktop as I am a Mac user. We downloaded 3 machines which were Ubuntu, Microsoft Windows, and Kali Linux.
Week 2 (May 27th) Virtualization concepts and VMware Configuration: This was the first week our Deliverable would be due. this was just an extension of the first because the support staff wanted to make sure we got the initial steps correct and understood how to provision another virtual machine if needed
Week 3 (June 3rd) Command Line to configure machines: This week we were using the command line interface (CLI) to Configure machines. I found this assignment to be fun because I like working in the CLI. We used commands to make move and delete files, create move-through and destroy directories, use “sudo” to elevate to root privileges, and learn how to read and look for files. From this assignment, I learned a lot of new commands that I didn’t know existed. I also learned that the commands from Windows Powershell and Linux Shell are a little bit different from each other.
Week 4 (June 10th) using infrastructure as Code: Up until this assignment we have been creating instances one by one. With infrastructure as code or Terraform, We were tasked with deploying multiple instances at once with Terraform. I learned that Terraform is used for automation and deployment. With the terraform code, I kept the file and used it to deploy more instances in my other deliverables. At first, looking at all the code, I was lost but after watching a few videos, I got a good understanding of it and wanted to learn more
Week 5 (June 17th) Cloud networking: This week was another fun week working in the command line to SSH and telnet from one machine to the other and essentially having both machines (kali Linux and Ubuntu machines) talk to each other. We did this by running the “ifconfig” to grab my Inet/IP address. with the IP address, we were then able to SSH into the different machines after opening port 22 to establish a secure connection. The reason for this deliverable was to understand the difference between SSH and Telnet. We then did the same thing but instead of SSH, we used Telnet. The process was pretty much the same but we used wireshark to capture all the traffic and we could see that with SSH, more encryption and security was offered. On the flip side of things, Telnet doesn’t offer much security and can be vulnerable to leaks.
Week 6 (June 24th) Host-based Firewalls: For this week we started out using Windows Powershell along with Windows Defender and Kali Linux. We first blocked all traffic on Windows and tried to find it using Kali, we got an error message saying that the Windows machine was down which is what is supposed to happen when we block all incoming traffic. After that, we allowed all traffic and we were able to find the Windows machine.
From this Internship, I gained a lot of exposure to content that wasn’t available to me as a student. I experienced real work will be outside of school. One of the difficulties I experienced was not knowing what to do if something went wrong or something didn’t work as it was supposed to. To overcome this, I would look at the instructions and make sure I understood them, if that didn’t work, I would watch YouTube videos and use open-source research to figure out what to do next. Most of the time that ended up working out but on the off chance it didn’t, I could ask my fellow peers and or support staff.
One of the unexpected things I learned is that the material isn’t that hard when your activity listening to the support staff when they demo and watching YouTube videos. There is a lot of support the hard part is just sitting down and studying the material.
The number 1 highlight for me was learning a lot of material that I can carry into my senior and or post-graduation life. and also connecting with fellow interns and bonding over Nerdy IT stuff.
This paper should be 5-7 pages.
Absolutely NO use of any AI.
Also, everything should tie into the program’s objectives which are
Information Systems and Network Security
Leveraging the Command Line Interface (CLI)
Infrastructure as Code Using Terraform
Technology Fluency
Problem-Solving
If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out!
