TITLE:
CYBER OPERATOR
IN THE CANADIAN FORCES
Cyber Operator is an individual who is tasked with monitoring and analyzing network traffic in the goals of defending Canada’s networks and information. The enemy is looking for information on our proprietary systems, our research, our development, all of our bigtime secrets. I work in one of the most secure facilities within the Canadian Forces. I come to work, I take a look at monitoring our automated systems, checking to see if any reports of vulnerabilities or attacks have been present. And once I’ve taken a look at our automated systems, I take a look at the threats of tomorrow; trying to find how people are trying to navigate through our networks without our notice. Whether it’d be from surveillance: watching active systems. Forensics: trying to reverse engineer malware or pull evidence off of infected machines. Reconnaissance: doing scans and looking for vulnerabilities, either within our systems or through interconnecting systems. Or you could be part of Red Team or Blue Team: individuals who are tasked with finding new vulnerabilities on our network. All the things that could cost the lives of soldiers overseas.
You always have to be looking for, how will the enemy break through our defences today? What you knew six months ago may not be valid today or tomorrow. The coolest part about the job is that I can’t talk about the coolest parts of my job. What I can say is that the unique challenges of seeing active operations, whether against us or what we are doing internally, presents challenges that you can’t get anywhere else.
(…similar activity coming from another subnet)
We are facing up against professionals who are getting paid fulltime to go after our networks and our assets. When you look at traffic and you know that something bad is happening, you do your research, you build tools and then the end result of all of that, you have what the enemy was doing in plain text. There is no more rewarding experience that I’ve ever had within the Canadian Forces.