Senior Technical Student, Cybersecurity Operations
Sep 2025 to Sep 2026Toronto Hydro Corporation, IT Security OperationsCo-op
// Certificates and PKI
- Issued and renewed TLS certificates in Venafi across dev, test and production during a certificate authority migration, and handled certificate revocation list (CRL) renewals and Root CA tasks as part of Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) support.
- Created certificate signing requests (CSRs) with OpenSSL, including subject alternative names and 2048 or 4096-bit keys, signed them through Microsoft Certificate Authority templates for server, client and mutual-TLS authentication, and built PKCS#12 bundles delivered through Secret Server instead of email.
// Smart cards and SCADA
- Helped re-distribute SCADA smart cards to Control Room Operators and Engineers across critical energy infrastructure, validating accounts, creating and issuing cards in Entrust, and documenting the procedure.
- Scripted smart-card certificate assignment for separate production and test environments, generating the requests and certificates, building PFX files and loading them onto the cards, and troubleshot PKI and enrollment errors.
// Monitoring and SIEM
- Triaged IBM QRadar (SIEM) events, including external-IP logins, account lockouts, suspicious application activity and unauthorized AD group changes, and used saved searches to trace lockouts by account and date range.
- Tuned QRadar use cases so recurring false positives stopped landing in the investigation queue.
// Network and remote access
- Supported secure remote access across VPN, Citrix and Entrust, including login, expiry and application-visibility problems, and managed secure-access client and Wi-Fi bypass groups for different staff types.
- Used nslookup and ping to confirm network connectivity problems before routing network and firewall tickets to the right team.
// Cloud (Azure and Entra ID)
- Worked in Microsoft Azure and Entra ID under senior supervision, setting up conditional access for specific applications and groups, handling role assignments and granting access to Azure-hosted GenAI services, and supporting the company-wide rollout of multi-factor authentication requirements for all users.
- Set up Entrust multi-factor authentication for users (email, phone and soft token) and enrolled privileged users in Microsoft Authenticator.
// Identity and access
- Worked 40 to 50 Identity and Access Management (IAM) and Threat, Risk and Compliance (TRC) tickets a day in BMC Remedy, with busy days above 100, against P1 to P4 SLA targets.
- Created and changed Active Directory accounts and security groups across production, test and development domains, including enables, disables, unlocks, expiry changes and proxy-address updates.
- Gave users file, folder, OneDrive, MOVEit and server access through least-privilege AD groups, confirming a privileged account first for server access, and repaired folder permissions when inheritance broke.
- Managed MOVEit file-transfer users, locked-IP unblocks and MFA resets, adding access through AD groups first so permissions stayed in sync, and checked password and account expiry through AD attributes.
- Reset passwords by reissuing access packages and extended expiring Citrix accounts, so remote users kept working without a repeat ticket.
- Found and disabled more than 1,000 unused accounts across the Active Directory domains, cutting standing access.
// Privileged access
- Set up privileged and service accounts and stored their credentials in Delinea Secret Server, sharing each secret only with the people who needed it.
- Granted server access by adding users to per-server AD groups (regular and administrator) in the correct domain, after confirming the requester held a privileged account, and added service accounts as server administrators when requested.
// Automation
- Replaced manual folder-access requests with a PowerShell script that sets and verifies permissions straight from the ticket, saving 3 to 4 minutes per request when folder inheritance was intact.
- Wrote further scripts in PowerShell and Python for account onboarding, bulk Active Directory queries and access reports.
// Governance and documentation
- Wrote five standard operating procedures for IAM requests, certificate management and onboarding, and co-wrote a 28-page ticket resolution guide with more than 70 procedures, now the handbook for incoming student technicians.
- Supported TRC risk assessments and audit requests, helped with SentinelOne tasks, and handled endpoint exception requests (USB and secure-access bypass) through logged group changes.
- Watched SLA clocks on the queue, escalated tickets as they neared 75% of their target, raised change requests in Remedy, and coordinated server decommission work orders across the SIEM, firewall and endpoint owners.