Happy New Year 7E1

Writing in Christmas to say thanks and to make a review of the year is already an habit since I decided to write in this blog five years ago. On the whole, this year has been exciting, like every last years, with many project, with ups and downs, with stressful time and relaxing time, with bad times and good times, but I think with the aim, always, of improving in each moment, with the aim of improving professionally and personally, being this last thing, “personally”, the most important fact for improving in a good professional relationship.

Working in many projects with lots of engineers, and not only in the same customer for the same project, make me happy because I can take in touch with many IT professionals and knowing many IT infrastructures at the same time to take the best things of each of them for improving the IT infrastructure of customers. Speaking with many people, younger or older, technical staff or chief or manager people is a pride and experience that has led me to work in multi-disciplinary teams abroad when I have been in Turkey, Russia or Czech Republic on holidays. In addition, this allow me to make interviews like what I did this summer to Jesús Corrales.

Speaking about studying and certifications, I passed the CISM (Certified Information Security Manager) exam and I took the CCNP re-certification where I review many concepts and I learnt many others like Hot potato and cold potato routing, Elephants or Long Fat Networks, SACK, or the Nagle's Algorithm. On the other hand, I applied for the F5 Certified BIG-IP Administrator which was two exams for getting this certification. In the meantime, you will have seen I keep writing in English language for improving my writing skill, of course, I started writing very bad at the beginning of the year but I think I'm writing with greater fluidity right now. Therefore, I have started to learn the French language this year and I hope keep studying this new language for the next years.

With regard to projects, I have been in many projects about security and networking. I started the year in the north of Spain (Oviedo) teaching about Virtual Private Networks (VPN) and Metro Ethernet, I also taught about Alcatel-Lucent Switching to the National Police of Spain and I have finished in Valladolid teaching about the Web Application Firewall of F5 Networks called ASM or Application Security Manager. In the meantime, I have had the luck to advise, install, configure and support load balancer solutions under F5 Networks and Radware, and Firewalls deployments under Fortinet for the public and private sector. I have also helped to deliver, support and maintain the Ariolo Cloud Services and I have installed probes and SIEM systems where I learnt about Traffic Direction Systems (TDS), I analysed that Telegram uses HTTP over HTTPS or when the Endesa ransomware was hunted by our SIEM.

Moreover, I have had the opportunity to give some speeches to civil servants of Extremadura and to a high school of Extremadura about security awareness, professional training and the private sector, and also about Bluetooth Security, Wireless Sensor Networks – WSN or Web Application Firewalls.

For the next year, I want to keep my CISA and CISM certification and to keep studying the French language. From time to time I'll read some books but what I want the most will be to share experiences and knowledge with other professionals and growing up in this amazing cyberworld.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.