The context 🧑🏻‍💻

As the first year of my degree was coming to an end, I had to find a company for an internship.

Due to my interest in back-end development and web networking, I applied for an internship at the large and prestigious company 'Orange', the leader in tele-communications in France, and they accepted me!

When I reflect on this experience, this was my first encounter with cybersecurity and CIPPS domains without knowing it then, who would have thought?

What did I actually do? 🤓

My goal for the 5 weeks I was there, was to develop an internal application to examine the weekly performances of Orange technicians in field interventions and to use this data to create a report and to know the failures and strengths within the different teams in the region.

Using Microsoft Excel, Excel Macros and Visual Basic on a daily basis, I achieved this goal with a lot of googling, good communication with my superior to understand the needs and objectives of this application and adaptability due to the organisation's internal procedures on data manipulation and access restrictions so that I could make my work, understandable.

What did I learn? 🧐

Right now with the knowledge I have acquired about cybersecurity and its areas of practice, I clearly see how some of them are part of my day-to-day life within the organisation.

Starting with my credential to enter the building and logging into the pre-configured PC I was given (Identity and Access Management), with its intrinsic restrictions of using it at home only with a secure network I was given access to (Communications and Network Security).

Also, the proofreading and debugging of my code by a senior developer to confirm that my code was good and clean (Software Development Security) and the secured access to the database only accessible by my on-call manager to then give me access to it (Asset Security).

This was definitely a heck of an experience where I learned a lot and where I really developed something that to this day, people in Orange still use!

(As you may think, I can't post any pictures of the application due to Orange's internal policies, sorry for the inconvenience).