Ali Ahmed Ismail

Relevant coursework: Cryptography, Network Security, Ethical Hacking and Penetration Testing, Digital Forensics, Software and Mobile Devices Security, Business Continuity and Risk Management.

• Rotated across the bank's vulnerability management, GRC, penetration testing and SOC teams.
• Ran vulnerability scans with Tenable and analyzed the findings by CVE and plugin.
• Worked with the GRC team on employee risk assessments aligned with ISO/IEC 27001.
• Ran phishing simulations to test employees' security awareness.
• Performed internal network penetration tests on each floor of the bank's offices, supervised by the penetration testing team.
• Used IBM QRadar (SIEM) with the SOC team to monitor and analyze security events.

• Shadowed cybersecurity staff in their daily work, learning how businesses apply security in practice.
• Observed how the team works with clients and handles their security needs.
• Built foundational knowledge of core security concepts, common threat vectors and basic security controls.

• Built a CVE checker that turns NVD, CISA KEV and EPSS data into a one-page brief for managers and analysts.
• Treated all upstream data and AI output as hostile: input validation, rate limiting, CSP with Trusted Types, 140+ offline tests including an XSS drill.

• Built a static portfolio hardened against XSS (strict CSP and Trusted Types, tested with injection payloads) with zero third-party requests and AWS infrastructure as code deployed keylessly via OIDC.