Vinay Morale

Security Operations Engineer – Industrial Placement Year

Cardiff University IT

Jun 2025 - Jun 2026

Actively monitored, detected and triaged suspicious security alerts and dealt with false positives using Elastic Search (ELK Stack). Developed Kibana Queries and constructed new dashboards for efficient visualization on the SIEM, deducting time consumption by 30%. Investigated and mitigated threats using Microsoft Defender XDR and Azure Sentinel. Created new detection rules leveraging complex KQL queries for handling over 50 incidents involving risky sign-ins of Microsoft Entra ID accounts. Built Incident Response Plan Runbooks which helped other team members for easy incident remediation. Configured Role-Based Access Controls on PaloAlto Network Firewalls using Cortex XDR for over 30000 users to enforce the principle of least privilege. Aided in reducing the university's attack surface by preventing hundreds of brute force and credential stuffing attacks. Conducted a full digital forensics investigation on an infected device, analysing a 256GB raw disk image and identified a malicious PowerShell script which used to download the Mimikatz tool into the system device. Documented and demonstrated all the findings parallelly mapping the techniques with Cyber Kill Chain and MITRE ATT&CK frameworks. Co-ordinated with a major university-wide firewall migration and utilized tcpdump by hopping on pfsense machines on each VLAN respectively, to troubleshoot and resolve network issues, reducing ticket resolution time by 20%.