Cyber Skills

Risk assessment and security planning

Professional experience

  • Review Vessel Security Assessments and Plans under 33 CFR Part 104, which weigh threats, vulnerabilities, consequences and protective measures, including cyber vulnerabilities.
  • Evaluate whether security plans and safety management systems address cyber risk, and document gaps in basic cyber hygiene.
  • Consider whether equipment failures in casualties could have a cyber cause, and know the incident reporting and response paths.

Frameworks and control verification

Professional experience

  • Apply the NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0 functions (Govern, Identify, Protect, Detect, Respond, Recover) to real operations.
  • Verify that documented controls are actually implemented, using objective evidence, under the ISM Code, MTSA and IMO maritime cyber risk guidance.

Resilience and incident response

Professional experience

  • Led responses to major casualties, coordinating multiple agencies to restore a critical transportation system.
  • Authored policy and led training programs to keep operations compliant under staffing constraints.

Stakeholder communication

Professional experience

  • Brief industry, executive and multi-agency partners on regulatory requirements and risk, and lead teams of inspectors through complex compliance work.

Network foundations

  • TCP/IP and OSI models, IP addressing and subnetting, DNS, DHCP, ARP, and wireless networking.
  • Packet analysis with Wireshark; denial-of-service concepts; building a small business network.

Identity, cloud and virtualization

  • IaaS, PaaS and SaaS and who is responsible for what; AWS security groups and IAM roles.
  • Virtual machines and virtualization types.

Monitoring and logging

  • Log server setup; SIM vs SEM vs SIEM; security vs privacy trade-offs.

Systems and server security

  • Linux administration: permissions, sudo, SSH, scheduled tasks, package managers; investigation commands such as grep, find and strings.
  • Web (Nginx with Let's Encrypt TLS), database (MySQL), DNS (DNSSEC, DNS over HTTPS and TLS) and email servers; SPF, DKIM and spoofing.

Cryptography and data basics

  • Binary, hexadecimal, ASCII and file headers; Boolean logic and XOR encryption.

Programming and computer science

UPenn coursework; NOVA certificate in progress

  • Python programming and computational thinking (University of Pennsylvania).
  • Working toward a Career Studies Certificate in Computer Science: Algorithms and Artificial Intelligence at Northern Virginia Community College, covering programming, data structures and algorithmic problem solving.