I’m GrumpyVaderCat or as many in the MMO world call me, Grumpy or Grumps.
The plan for this blog is to be able to give back to the community. I’d like to help others by sharing my experiences both good and bad as veteran transitioning to the field of Cybersecurity and as a member of the Cybersecurity community.
I’ve been in the Cybersecurity community for closing in on 3 years now. A little more than 2.5 years of that time has been doing incident response. It has been a trial by fire since Day 1 in the Incident Response (IR) world. I would not actually recommend doing IR as your first cybersecurity role. I’ve obviously done it, but there were LOTS of growing pains along the way. I went from having a very bad case of imposter syndrome and not having a lot of confidence in what I was doing to becoming one of the people who gets called regularly to squash a cyber incident and consult when there is a ticket that needs a deeper dive. One big thing that IR has taught me is there is sooooo much to learn in this field and so many different roles to fill.
Like a lot of people, I was attracted to Cybersecurity because of the ethical hacking/penetration testing side of things. I have knowledge of a lot of the basics (and a certification), but I’m trying to go much deeper than just the basics. As of the writing of this post, I play around on TryHackMe and I have a number of certifications and courses in my learning queue (eLearnSecurity/INE‘s PTS and WAPT, the entire catalog of TCM Security Academy, a bunch of Udemy courses, and recently Blue Team Security‘s Blue Team Level 1 training/certification for work). In addition to all of that, I’d like to start a Master’s degree at some point in the next year. And if that wasn’t enough, I’ve found this fascination with OSINT and various OSINT courses (the OSINTion, OSINT Combine, and Michael Bazzell’s offerings ). This is all in addition to anything I want to do for entertainment. On top of that, I’d eventually like to get involved with some of the streaming communities.
I draw inspiration from fellow practioners like Heath Adams (@thecybermentor), Joe Helle AKA TheMayor (@joehelle), and many other of the Infosec Twitter Who’s Who. Heath and Joe are beasts when it comes to getting things done. I aspire for this blog to reach the epicness of DFIRDiva‘s blog (@dfirdiva).
Look for reviews and project updates in future as well as other content while I get started with this blog. Bear with me with grammar, formatting, and design issues while I fumble my way through blog entries. 🙂
GrumpyVaderCat Security 