My internship at Ordina: Tom De Wandel

My name is Tom De Wandel, a Cyber Security Professional student at Howest Bruges. To finish my stud-ies, I had to do a 3-month-during internship in an ICT company. Ordina was the perfect fit for me. I was part of the Security Operations Center team where my task was to work as a CTI analyst.

Who am I

I’m a 22-year-old student from Mechelen, who studies Cyber Security Professional at Howest in Bruges. Here I learnt a lot about various topics in the cybersecurity space, though this was more red-teaming relat-ed. During my studies I really enjoyed to web-pentest as well as pentesting a whole network and the systems in it. I also had a course where we tested out malware which came in handy for the CTI analysis. Sometimes in my spare time I also join some CTFs with friends, which I really enjoy doing.

How did I find Ordina?

While I was looking for an internship, I contacted some companies but with no success until someone told me to try at Ordina, I googled the company and it looked great! I gave it a try and applied at the website. However the deadline of having an oral-agreement was short, so I decided to phone H.R. Anne-Mie Truyen, this showed initiative she said. The call was nice and not stressful at all. I received a positive answer and I got approved. Then I had to do a technical interview with Emmanouil Perselis, an interview planned for 30 minutes ended up being a call of 1.5 hours! This was nice, we talked about the technical part as well as other topics outside of IT, to get to know each other better. We ended the call with positive feedback and I could start at Ordina at 14th of February, valentines day.

My work at Ordina

I worked as a CTI analyst, which is part of blue-teaming, quite the opposite of what I learnt at school. But that didn’t matter, it was fun and interesting to look at security from a different perspective. My main task was to look on the internet on different news sources for new vulnerabilities, malwares being exploited in the wild, etc… If I’ve found an interesting topic, I had to write a report about it as well as test if the exploit was possible on our systems. We had a weekly SOC meeting where I had to present my reports. I increased my reporting skills as well as my presentations skills. The process of going through all the websites to find information about the topics is something that could be improved with for example an open source threat sharing platform.

My time at Ordina

My time at Ordina has been great. The Covid-rules were less strict and we could go to the office! Sadly I got Covid the first week of my internship and had to work from home for a week. After a week I gladly could go back to the office where it was always pleasant to be. I met many colleagues and also a fellow intern. They supported me along the way, if I had any questions I could ask them and they would always be happy to help me. I tried to go to the office as much as possible, that way I got to know some colleagues very well. Every two weeks on Friday we have a Lunch & Learn meeting, during those meetings an interesting topic was being presented by someone during our lunchbreak and people could ask questions in the meanwhile, I also had to present in one of those Lunch & Learn sessions about how my internship went at Ordina.

The future

I can happily say that I’m returning to home soil, I do need to finish my thesis first and then I’ll have my final summer break, after that I’m going to start working for Ordina on the 1st of September. I completed the CTF too, something that every candidate should do, to me that was a lot of fun. I’m really looking forward to the 1st of September to step into the Ordina family as employee.

I thank Ordina and the Security Area, to give me the chance to do my internship here, this lead to the con-tract signing.

If you are interested in working for Ordina or would like to know more about our services for your company, don’t hesitate to contact us.