Capstone

Written on September 6th, 2021 by Caitlin Allen

After redoing my website, completing my senior year in a pandemic, finishing capstone, graduating, and starting full-time as a threat analyst, I am finally back and going to post more! Graduating in a pandemic was not the most fun, but at least I was able to get pictures with my friends and put together a capstone I am proud of and will be presenting this week as student research at the 2021 WiCys conference in Denver, CO!

Senior year during COVID was not the best, it was isolating to not have any classes online, the workload felt incredibly intense and hard to juggle, and hanging out with close friends was pretty much off limits. We did get some type of in-person graduation and living in Vermont has made me feel incredibly safe with our high vaccination rates, but we really only got to enjoy the last three weeks of senior year in a more normal way. I am proud of all my friends for their hard work and now going on to work at some amazing companies doing awesome things in cybersecurity and forensics!
So what is my capstone? I worked with my classmate, Adam Cunningham, to combine our interests in both the forensics and cybersecurity world to figure out if honeypots can be an asset to threat intelligence by helping predict attacks. We decided on doing this right around the time I wanted to become a threat analyst and it allowed me to really explore what would soon become my area of current work on my own terms and benefit the industry. Below you can view the paper!