Meet our consultant: Emmanouil Perselis
Emmanouil is a talented penetration tester who also has experience in a variety of other cybersecurity areas. Let’s see how he has gotten to this point.
Firstly, how did you get started in the cybersecurity field?
I started my career in cybersecurity as a bug bounty hunter when I was 15 years old. During this phase of my career, I found 2 Zero-Days. I realized hereafter that not all companies pay enough attention to the found vulnerabilities. So, I switched to focus on performing penetration tests as a freelancer. Through this experience, I realized that I can achieve much more by working in a team. This is why I decided to come and work for Ordina. They really promote team work and teach you how to work in a high performance environment. This was a necessary upgrade for my career.
What is your current specialty in the cybersecurity field?
I am specialized in red teaming exercises and penetration tests while I have also experience in blue teaming and incident response. Developing hacking tools and programming in general is also something I am very interested in and love to do.
What qualities do you believe all highly successful cybersecurity professionals share?
Passion, integrity, conscientiousness. Without passion, it is impossible to perform well in any position. Aside from that, having integrity and conscientiousness is an absolute necessity since your knowledge in cybersecurity could have a significant influence on society in general.
How do you want to develop your career further?
My aspiration is to lead a penetration test and red team. I also want to develop the penetration testing methodologies further.
What is one of the most efficient actions that organizations can take to improve its cybersecurity posture?
Migrating to a cloud. It is likely cheaper and definitely safer, since you can transfer some of the responsibility to the 3rd party. This allows your company to use the experience and knowledge of the cloud provider specialized in the management of infrastructure that must integrate security features. Furthermore, the cloud providers mitigate risks by having common protection measures that are essentially funded by all the tenants. This is a way to share the knowledge and expertise among all tenants.
At the end, for those who are interested in cybersecurity, could you recommend a book describes cybersecurity well?
One of the books that describe what can happen even today is “Ghost In The Wires: My Adventures as the World’s Most Wanted Hacker (Kevin Mitnick, William Simon)”. This book describes how the author Kevin Mitnick hid himself while continuing to hack many big enterprises. The same scenario can take place even today as most companies do not invest enough in their cybersecurity yet.
Another book that shows how anyone can easily make themselves invisible on the internet is my book “Panopticism Ex Machina: Practical ways to obtain anonymity, confidentiality of data and repudiability of actions on the internet and why it is necessary (Emmanouil Perselis)”. This book describes processes to make you undetectable while performing actions using state-of-the-art encryption. This is not so much meant to aid hackers but rather for general users to protect their digital life and their privacy on-line.