My Internship Experience at NVISO – by Thibaut Flochon

Hi! I’m Thibaut, a bachelor student in Information Technology at Hénallux. As a final-year student, I have had the opportunity to do my internship at NVISO for 4 months. Let me share this experience with you!

Why NVISO?

The year before my internship, I took part in the Cyber Security Challenge Belgium 2017 with some friends. Playing with Wireshark captures, trying to brute force passwords, analysing files, all are activities that really made me want to know more about the cyber security field. That’s why the following year, when the time had come to do my internship, I directly thought about cyber security and told myself “Why not do my internship in the company organising the annual competition? “ And here I was, intern at NVISO!

What did I do?

The goal of my internship was to create a cyber attack scenario within NVISO’s training infrastructure. With basically no knowledge about post-compromise attacks against a Windows domain, a great learning journey was waiting for me.

At first, I had a meeting with my internship mentor, Wouter, to talk a bit about the “what”, and “why” of my project. I could then start to gather some info on the “how”, in order to figure out possibilities and tools I could use to create that cyber attack scenario.

Once I found enough info and resources for my project, Wouter kindly guided me to the right employee to ask questions to, so that I could sort out what I found and keep the necessary, to be sure to create something useful for the company. Following that meeting, lunch time! After having grabbed a sandwich with other employees and interns, we ate our meal all together in the cafeteria, as is NVISO team’s habit.

As the weeks passed and through regular follow-ups and meetings, I was glad to see my project really move forward; the cyber attack scenario was almost finished.

Time flies! A few weeks later, it was already the end of my internship. I made a PowerPoint presentation presenting the finished scenario and the results of my internship!

Conclusion

I have had a great time during that internship; I learnt a lot about attacks against Windows domains, I improved my soft skills by explaining technical issues in an understandable way, and I laughed a lot with my colleagues! Until a next time!