Home Mandiant Internship
Post
Cancel

Mandiant Internship

Overview:

Over the summer of 2022 I was able to intern with Mandiant (Part of Google Cloud) as a penetration testing intern on their proactive team.

Duties and projects

During my time at Mandiant I was responsible for performing a number of different offensive security tests including:

  • Web application fuzzing
  • Creating phishing campaigns
  • Creating and executing vishing campaigns
  • dotNet web application reverse engineering & analysis
  • Route-Sixty Sink development

Skills learned – technical and soft

I learned an incredible amount of technical skills during my time at Mandiant. One of these technical skills is DLL search order hijacking for persistance in a windows environment. I encountered this technique during a red team engagment that I was shadowing and I decided to spend some time on my own to make sure I understood how it worked. I was able to put together a small presentation from my research to prove my understanding and to give me a chance the questions I still had surrounding the topic.

I was also exposed to a number of different technical skills surrounding C# and dotNet projects. I was able to help contribute code to a new tool developed by the company that was written in C#. I also used several commerically available dotNet project decompilers for manual analysis of web applications.

As for soft skills, I was able to get a great deal of experience with report writting. For each finding I worked on I was expected to summarize how I found the vulnerability, why it would be considered an issue, and how best to remediate it. This responsiblitiy allowed me to practice my ability to translate highly technical data into more approachable and useful information for clients.

Evaluations

After every engagement I was shadowing for I had an opportunity to ask for and recieve feedback from the full time emplyoee’s I was shadowing. While I didn’t see this feedback directly, my manager assured me that he had only heard good things about my work ethic and the results I was getting from my work.

At the end of my internship I was offered a full time position on the same team I had worked with all summer.

Presentations

Part of my responsibilities during this internship was to present on vulnerabilities I discovered to clients. I did this on several occasions, but the presentations were short enough as to not warrent a formal slides show.

At the end of my internship I also presented on the development work I did on the open source tool Route-Sixty Sink. That presentation contains some proprietary information from the internal development systems at Mandiant and I am therefore unable to share those slides.

This post is licensed under CC BY 4.0 by the author.