Merry Christmas and Happy New Year

I’m here, in my home, with my laptop, doing my weekly homework and writing this post quietly like any other day. Today is Christmas, and it is a must to write about it, I have to write about how was this nearly ended 2017. This year has been rewarding, accelerated sometimes but slow other times, which began with lots of travelling and has finished in the same way but has been a little bit relaxing in the middle of the year. It has been a year where I’ve been able to work in many projects about security and networking, I’ve been able to meet up with IT professionals, I’ve been able to read many books, I’ve been able to study …. I’ve been able to do many things.

At the beginning of the year, I was working in a project where I had to install and configure nine firewall appliances around Extremadura, which was deployed into a wireless network with captive portal and LDAP integration, once this project was finished, I delivered the Alcatel-Lucent Omniswitch AOS Troubleshooting Training Course in Madrid. In the meantime, I was reading, studying and writing about PBB, SPB, VxLAN and Overlay Technologies as well as analysing vulnerabilities like the Apache Struts Vulnerability.

The second trimester of the year wasn’t stressful like it was the beginning of the year. Therefore, I had time to read the Steve Jobs Biography as well as speaking Spanglish and Frañol at Official School of Languages to end up passing French language A1 level. I was also reading and testing the new FortiOS 5.6, which brings new features like VxLAN and SD-WAN, thus I deployed a virtual firewall and I deployed a virtual SIEM as well that I used for my speech about the importance of security at CUM.

Summer was closer and I was installing and configuring firewall appliances, analysing security alarms from Ariolo and, reading, learning and studying new books, technologies and protocols. For instance, I had to read about the DTLS protocol for improving SSL VPN performance with DTLS and I was decrypting DTLS traffic with Wireshark. I had also time this summer to go to Galicia & Porto and reading the book No place to hide: Snowden and the NSA, which was my motivation to write about Spy Files Russia from WikiLeaks.

The end of the year has been thrilling again with many projects to close before starting the new year. The most time-consuming projects were the Security Courses on Networks and Systems, and the Ethical Hacking Course, where students have created a backdoor for Android systems, they have learnt about making their App safer with HTTP Security Policy like HSTS, and many other security things. To finish this year, I’ve been installing a Web Application Firewall along with a load-balanced cluster to protect XML and Web Services as well as WebSockets.

As we can see, this has been a year full of many security and networking things but I’ve been working with virtualization, storage, systems and cloud computing as well. As a result, I’m an engineer with 8 years of expertise and I’ve been able to learn and work with lots of technology, thus I want to keep improving like this.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.