About

I’m Joel, a cybersecurity student at the University of Bonn with a strong interest in low-level security, especially binary exploitation, reverse engineering, and system internals. I enjoy learning by doing, digging into how systems work, and exploring both their weaknesses and defenses. Beyond technology, I’m also interested in politics and philosophy, which give me a broader perspective on how cybersecurity connects to society and ethics. I would describe myself as curious, analytical, and motivated to keep learning and growing as a security professional.

Work Experience

Alongside my studies, I work as a student assistant at Bechtle AG in the Managed Services team. There, I’ve been responsible for automating CERT reports by integrating them into ticket systems, developing an internal platform to centralize customer links, and supporting administrative tasks in enterprise Windows environments, including user management with Active Directory and server setup. This hands-on experience has helped me connect theory from my studies with real-world IT operations and gain first experience in the corporate world.

Projects

I actively build my skills through personal projects and competitions. One highlight was qualifying for the finals of the 2025 Potsdam Cyber Games CTF, placing 8th out of over 700 student teams. Capture the Flag competitions are a major way I practice security topics like web exploitation, cryptography, reverse engineering, and forensics under realistic conditions.

I also set up a full Security Operations Center lab using Microsoft Azure, with Sentinel as a SIEM solution, an RDP honeypot for data collection, and external threat intelligence integrated through a MISP deployment in Docker. I created automated synchronization pipelines with Python functions and wrote correlation rules to detect relevant security events. These projects deepened my skills in cloud security, KQL, Docker, Linux, and automation.