Coursework

Highlights

I finished with four high distinctions. My highest mark in the degree is System Security (HD, 88), the most core security subject in it; Information Security and Management (HD, 86) sits level with Communication for IT Professionals (HD, 86); and the fourth is Professional Practice in Computing (HD). Strong on the security itself, and clear when I have to explain it, which is really the whole pitch.

In January 2025 I completed the Tropical Data Science School in Malaysia, a UTS international short program: data science coursework in mixed teams, in a country I had never been to, and something I chose to put myself into rather than had to.

Security core

• System Security HD 88

  Hardening, endpoint and perimeter security, attack surfaces. My highest mark in the degree.

• Information Security & Management HD 86

  Governance, risk and policy, the language a customer's security leadership actually speaks. I wrote the security assessment for a healthcare provider holding 800,000 patient records on my own: every policy gap worked through its risks, its threats, its countermeasures and its exposure under the Privacy Act, ending in four things to fix and multi-factor authentication, password rotation, role-based access control and VPN restriction to fix them with. The half I found hardest was the management side, deciding what a staff training programme should actually make people retain, and it turned out to be the half that mattered most.

• Cyber Threat Intel & Incident Response D 81

  Produced a full APT38 incident response plan on the ACSC template with NIST and SANS lifecycles, mapped to MITRE ATT&CK. Guest speakers from vendor ThreatDefence.

• Cloud Security D 82

  AWS (EC2, IAM), ACSC cloud guidance, ISO/IEC 27017 and shared responsibility, assessed through a migration security report.

• Digital Forensics C 73

  Disk acquisition, file systems and browser artefacts, plus the assignment I am proudest of in the first half of the degree: three of us replicated identical browsing on Brave, Firefox and IceCat across Kali Linux and macOS, then went looking for what each one leaves behind in its cookie and history databases, its cache and its local storage. It came back 75 out of 75, with 20 out of 20 on the presentation. The subject mark is a Credit because I lost most of it on the skills test, which is the honest version of that story.

• Digital Trace & Identity D 76

  Two full cases ending in court-style expert reports: hash-verified evidence, artefact correlation in Autopsy, FTK Imager and the Eric Zimmerman tools, and counter-forensics finds including a JPEG and ZIP polyglot. The second case was an alleged financial fraud, where the evidence turned on cheque-writing software and the records it left behind.

• Cryptography

  Analysed an SSH man-in-the-middle attack; cracked WEP and WPA2 in a lab and compared them to WPA3. I can explain why crypto matters because I have broken the weak versions myself.

• Network Fundamentals D 81

  TCP/IP, DNS, DHCP, VPNs and firewalls, hands-on in Wireshark and Packet Tracer. The foundation under every security conversation.

• IoT & mobile security

  IoT threat modelling that fed directly into my capstone detection pipeline. On the mobile side I worked through the iOS security architecture properly rather than in outline: the secure boot chain, the Secure Enclave, code signing, sandboxing and data protection, then how iOS handles TLS, VPNs, Wi-Fi and AirDrop. It is the clearest example I have seen of security designed in from the silicon up, and it changed how I think about defending anything.

Analytics & machine learning

• Data Analytics in Cybersecurity D 78

  Spam and intrusion classifiers in scikit-learn, TensorFlow and PyTorch, tested against adversarial ML evasion, extended with a deep-learning DDoS detector.

• Cybersecurity Capstone Studio

  The IoT anomaly detection pipeline: Isolation Forest on IoT-23, served from a Flask API on a Raspberry Pi, live predictions into Elastic and Kibana.

• Introduction to Data Analytics D

  A complete loan-default classification pipeline: 35,000-record training set, 19 attributes, engineered temporal features, a deliberate missing-data strategy and a held-out 15,000-prediction submission, plus a date-format bug caught before it silently corrupted half the test set.

• Tropical Data Science School Malaysia

  UTS international short program, January 2025: statistics and modelling in JMP, R and TensorFlow with a Tableau dashboard presented at the close. What it is graded on back home is not the data science though, it is a skills report, where I pulled ten advertised Australian cyber and IT roles apart to see what employers were really asking for and then held my own skills up against them honestly. That is where I first saw in writing how far the gap was between where I stood and where I wanted to be.

Professional & communication

• Communication for IT Professionals HD 86

  Built on the Engineers Without Borders Challenge: a team of six designing a cultural rest stop for Yirrganydji Country in far north Queensland, written up as a formal report for the community it was meant to serve. I wrote the executive summary and the case for the design opportunity. The same skill got exercised for real later in the degree: a court-style forensics report for a non-technical reader, an incident response plan written for executives, and a briefing and formal speech delivered to Microsoft.

• Project Management & the Professional D 77

  A team of six planning a hotel guest hospitality system replacement end to end, from the charter through to a briefing report written for the customer rather than for us. I took the executive summary, the activity-on-node schedule with its critical path, and the conclusion, which is to say the top of the document, the timing underneath it, and the part that has to land. I also wrote the ethics report on my own, arguing a conflict of interest sitting with a CEO against the ACS, IEEE and PMI codes. This is the closest the degree came to scoping real work for a client: a brief goes in, and a defensible scope, schedule and cost has to come out, in language the customer can actually follow.

• Foundations

  Programming, web systems, database fundamentals and business requirements modelling from the first two years. The reason I could build and ship both apps on top of the degree.