David Piedra - Developer & Security Engineer

David Piedra

Passionate about building elegant software solutions, and building & deploying large scale secure systems. Explore my projects and professional journey.

Featured Projects

AEGIS

AEGIS: Automated Event Governance for Infrastructure Security. - Utilized Terraform and Ansible to automatically deploy and provision Infrastructure and Services defined as JSON. - Integrated with SIEM Alerts and Network Anomaly Detection models to automatically investigate events/anomalies and generate reports. - Proof of Concepted the ability to automatically recover from low-level events.

TerraformAnsiblePythonDockerLogstashElasticsearchIncident Response

IsoFlow

Performs anomaly detection on inbound and outbound network traffic. - Utilized Isolation Forest models to find network anomalies, given a target % threshold of traffic - Integrated with Logstash for Netflow collection, ingesting netflows in real time to send alerts for anomalous traffic - Sends anomalous netflows to AEGIS for automated investigation

NetFlowPythonScikit-learnPandasAnomaly DetectionIncident Response

Boilerexams Infrastructure Overhaul

Spearheaded a complete overhaul of Boilerexams' IT infrastructure, introducing scalable and secure systems to support over 70 employees and thousands of users. Delivered key solutions including: - A mail server suite with advanced authentication and IPS capabilities. - A redesigned network topology with secure remote access and backups. - A real-time monitoring suite for hardware, webserver, and database performance. - Unified user authentication and permissions management with OpenLDAP.

PostfixDovecotKVMOpenVPNGrafanaPrometheusTelegrafOpenLDAPNextcloudDockerdnsmasqPostgresql

Independent Projects

Technical

Programming

Artificial Intelligence

Work Experience

Cybersecurity & Critical Infrastructure Intern

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

June 2024 - August 2024

  • Contributed to a webapp using MongoDB, Express, Angular, and Node.js to assess security for Critical Infrastructure
  • Developed and analyzed cyber attack strategies, deriving their likelihood and effects
  • Prototyped a tool to simulate cyberattacks using Terraform and Ansible
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory logo
Network Engineering Aide

Purdue IT

October 2024 - Present

  • Automated ISO audit tracking and data entry with Python
  • Aided in maintaining and upgrading network infrastructure for a campus of 60000 students
  • Assisted Network Engineers in both troubleshooting and trend analysis to resolve outages and issues
  • Configured, Installed, and Replaced Cisco equipment such as Routers, Switches, Distros
Purdue IT logo
Full Stack Developer & Security Engineer

Boilerexams

November 2023 - Present

  • Worked with Node.js, React, Tailwind to help design frontend solutions for a website serving thousands of page views per day
  • Utilized Node.js, Prisma, and Postgresql to create an api for the website, serving up to 40 thousand queries/day
  • Constructed an efficient and secure server architecture and network topology for the organization
  • Deployed a Web Application Firewall on the reverse proxy to protect all websites exposed externally
  • Implemented an Intrusion Prevention System on a mail server which resulted in an average of 10 bruteforce attempts per day prevented
Boilerexams logo

Certifications

CompTIA IT Fundamentals (ITF+) Certification
CompTIA IT Fundamentals (ITF+) Certification

Issued by CompTIA on March 2024

Information TechnologyInformation Technology InfrastructureBusiness Continuity
CompTIA Security+ Certification
CompTIA Security+ Certification

Issued by CompTIA on May 2024

CybersecurityNetwork SecuritySecurity AnalystBusiness Continuity

Extracurricular Activities

NCL CyberSkyline CTF - Spring 2024

NCL CyberSkyline CTF - Spring 2024

Finished in the top 1% of 8000 participants in this Capture the Flag which tests a broad set of Cybersecurity knowledge and skillsets.

Cyber Sentinel CTF - Summer 2024

Cyber Sentinel CTF - Summer 2024

Participated in an exclusive CTF hosted with the US Department of Defense and placed 154th out of 2800 participants and 5000+ applicants.