My name is Daniel and i am from Prague in Czech Republic. This is my blog about about cyber security, networking, ethical hacking and digital forensics. Basically every exercise and labbing projects i do in my free and university time, i upload here. When i was 22 and came back from Iceland where i was working on a farm for half a year, i realized i want to work in IT.

ISP Internet Network Service Technician

My first small experience i got in datacenter where i worked for two months, then left because i didn’t have any experiences back then. After some self-studyig i managed to work for ISP company where i was working as service technician. I was connecting people to internet and repairing their internet connection, i loved this job because i got to work outside and still doing networking which was very fun. My work was mostly in Central Bohemian region, west and south part to be specific and sometimes Prague. The Bohemian region was better because there were houses mostly and easy to park and many time you could enjoy the nature and view from the roof. In my free time i was studying frequency range and was fascinated with those radio waves and electomagnetic spectre where is acually the range which is visible light.

Imagine you are on a roof where you are mounting Nanostation AC from Ubuquity to the boom on chimney, and you are enjoying summer sunny afternoon foresty landscape all around you. You lay the cable where customer wants to, ideally i had to force them to let me leave the „power over ethernet“ or „POE“ on the attic. Then lead it the living room because everyone wants to be on the phone while watching TV. Sometimes they were honest and told me they want to have a signal on the toilet as well. We were deplouying routers WR0841 TP-link and for more heavy users like gamers or people that took more expensive tariff, TP-Link Archer C6.

On the main nodes in the network we were using OSPF to dynamically advertise the networks. On smaller transmitters we had edgerouter that has statically configured routes. I got to work on transmitters that had no router, just switch and some VLANs. These transmitters usually worked as a bridge to someone who had no choice to get another internet connection to their house on the village or hut. Since there are lot of edgerouters with static router in the network, we had to go with multi-area OSPF because the routing tables the routers would go crazy. The major nodes on the nework were one for Prague, one for Beroun area, one for Mníšek area. Those are main towns we were covering with connection and where i worked. Each of them we assigned subnet from private range. Prague was the only one that had B range, Beroun had 10.200.0.0/16 from class A but subnetted. Mníšek had many small subnets form class A.

The datacenter with BGP we had in Prague and i also heard that there is another one under the Žižkov tower that was in previous years in communism era used is radio centre or soemthing and now they are converting it to datacenter. I don’t know if there is another BGP or not but probably yeah. We were lucky because when i worked there we had thousands of public IP addresses, and new blocks ran out. That means if there was a new ISP company, they would have to wait until old ISP is bancrupts or terminates the business. I didn’t kno much about the infrastructure, or how our backbone was desgin, so the sutff i talk about here is jsut what my collegue told me or what i heard or saw, i got to work on small transmitters only.

On the University in UK

Working for the ISP was amazing, sometimes i really miss that. But i realized that IT is extemely large field, you never stop to learn, every employer wants you to know everything and if i want to make some progress then i probably have to have at lest bachelors degree, because i didn’t know how to approach this, where should i start to make some progress because at the ISP i was just going from house to house swapping antennas and routers and didn’t do any progress. So i left to UK to study Cyber Security (hons) bachelors degree.

I made a huge progress since i’ve been here, i’m finishing my degree very soon and i learnt a lot. I can create API in python, write a program that extracts packet headers, basics of forensics, use so many tools for hacking and so much more. I still want to improve my skills, that’s why i want to work and apply for masters as well.

Since i have been working on my thesis i made a big progress in python programming. For my Software Security module we’ve had to create vulnerable API with three vulnerabilites from OWASP top 10 2017 list. The fixed API python code is going to be uploaded here on the blog page just like all the other projects.

My life now is cyber security, networking, ethical hacking, forensics and watching news, political debates and interviews, journalism from war on Ukraine. But about war i’m not writing here.

Daniel