Author: André Henriques

  • My Journey with the Blue Team Level 1

    My Journey with the Blue Team Level 1

    I decided to take the exam for the first time at the end of 2024 and It was a bit overwhelming. After the bootcamp at Ironhack, I thought I was more than ready and had my second try at it. I failed once more, by one answer. This was my third attempt at the exam.…

  • How I Passed the CompTIA Security+ Exam

    How I Passed the CompTIA Security+ Exam

    This wasn’t my first CompTIA exam, so I felt comfortable on how I was going to study for it. It took me about 6-7 weeks and a schedule with daily and weekly goals. When I finished the Ironhack bootcamp, I started watching Jason Dion’s Udemy course. Some materials I just needed some revision because the…

  • My First Cybersecurity Conference: C-Days 2025

    My First Cybersecurity Conference: C-Days 2025

    This week I attended my first Cybersecurity conference at the Estoril Convention Center called C-days. It was organized by the National Cybersecurity Centre here in Portugal. I’ve been connecting with people on LinkedIn to learn about their paths on how they got into this industry and I was lucky to find this conference, one day…

  • One Week Post-Bootcamp: Rebuilding Discipline and Direction, and Failed Exam

    One Week Post-Bootcamp: Rebuilding Discipline and Direction, and Failed Exam

    It’s been a week since I graduated from Ironhack. I already miss the structure I had with the fixed schedule and having people around with the same purpose. But I still did two CTFs with Mathieu (Ironhack classmate) this week about git. I also did some studying for the CompTIA Security+ but not as much…

  • Day 45

    My last day at Ironhack. It started with the presentations in the morning. Each group had done a project. I did a penetration testing project with a Capture The Flag exercise. We made a presentation in slides, and each of us had 5 minutes to present it. My group was the first to start and,…

  • Day 44

    We gathered once more to start/conclude our final project. We started with our last news segment and from people’s faces I could tell almost no one was excited about that. I think it’s because we’re approaching our last day and people were expecting a more relaxed day because we’re done with the practical exams. Personally,…

  • Day 43

    The final practical lab was today and it was on Pentesting. I think this was the one that people struggled the most. Personally, it was the one I most enjoyed. Kevin also gave us a clue for this one so the part that everyone struggled was a bit easier, at least for me. I knew…

  • Day 42

    So today was a bit tiring. Two practical exams, one about SOC and the other about malware analysis. I finished both early but one or two questions were a bit frustrating. It all started with the SOC lab where we used Splunk. I cannot give much details but the first few questions were more theoretical…

  • Day 41

    Today was final assessment day, and it went pretty well for me and everybody. We all passed with a 93% cohort average. I had three wrong answers, and one of them was a bit ambiguous because of the way the question was phrased. It had the word “only” in it, so I was also right…

  • Day 40

    We started with a news segment today. I was with Jacobo, Simon and Alfonso and we decided to all present the news in segments. I do prefer it this way instead of just one person presenting the whole thing. Today was all about Powershell and revision. Kevin introduced us to some basics and prepared us…