Written by Laurent Dupont

Day in the Life: Steven Wierckx

Ever wondered what a typical day looks like for cybersecurity expert Steven Wierckx?

From executing threat models to managing our Toreon academy, Steven wrote it all down in this blog.

18/01/2024

It’s Friday so let’s close the week successfully.

The day starts at 8 a.m. with a review of today’s planning. I know I will be performing a threat model from 9 to 12 and there are some weekly meetings at the end of the workday. I have a flexible schedule for the afternoon so it looks like I will have some time to close some outstanding tasks as well.

First I prepared the threat model meeting. Today we’re working from home, so I open the meeting a couple of minutes early to give everybody time to have a quick chat before we get to business. I start with a quick recap on the purpose of threat modeling and get the meeting started. Together with the architecture team of the customer we create some drawings and discuss potential threats to the system. The meeting ends at 11:30 and I take the next half hour to go through the notes my colleague made, and I append some information where needed.

Time for lunch, my wife cooked a warm meal. This should help me get the energy to perform optimally for the rest of the day.

The Academy is responsible for training all new hires that come straight out of school. We provide them with a personalized learning path of roughly 60 days of study for both technical skills and soft skills.

Before looking at some open tasks I took some time to start writing the threat model report for the meeting from this morning, I detail some business risks and start the analysis on potential mitigation for the problems discovered this morning. I will finish this work next week.

On to the open tasks. There is a report on the maturity of the secure software development lifecycle from a colleague that I can review so it can be sent to our customer. Quality is important so every report needs to be reviewed before sending it out. I found a couple of minor items to improve and sent the report back.

Next on my to-do list, update the threat model training with the latest insights ‘from the field’. This training is very popular, and we keep it up to date with every bit of knowledge and experience we gain performing threat models.

The latest Threat Modeling news straight to your inbox

I have another hour before the meetings start so I review the planning of the people in my team, I assign them some extra work, just in case they finish their tasks early.

The Academy team meeting starts. The Academy team’s priority is to ensure the gathering and distribution of knowledge. We discuss what is going well and where we can improve our transfer of knowledge in the organization. The Academy is also responsible for training all new hires that come straight out of school. We provide them with a personalized learning path of roughly 60 days of study for both technical skills and soft skills. We detect that there is a need for everybody to learn about OKR (Objective and Key Results) so we add relevant training from our training provider to the list of topics that a trainee needs to study. In this case, it is a video series with some exercises that they should be able to finish in 3 hours.

At the end of the day...

The last meeting of the day is a touchpoint with one of my team members. Toreon is serious about a good work-life balance and these bi-weekly 30-minute touchpoints serve as a check to make sure this balance is optimal.