Business Continuity & Response Plan Policy Document

• Improve Union Mutual's cyber threat readiness

Developed a full business response plan based on CISA, NIST, and US Chamber of Commerce best practices consisting of:

• Overarching policy strategy with management feedback and commitments
• 3 incident plans for building loss, a ransomware attack, and a personal data breach
• 4 sample checklists to be activated in current and future incident plans
• 11 tabletop exercises with buy-in from all business units to practice the incident response cycle

My research over the summer led to the creation of a new, interdepartmental incident response unit.

• Knowledge of best practices and common weak points in medium-large organziations' cybersecurity
• Organzing and efficiently summaraizng large volumes of written information
• Understanding and communicating to different audiances at appropriate technical knowlege

US Drone Strike Analysis C++ Python

• Better understand of the scale of the US engagement in Afghanistan
• Build working knowledge of Big-O complexity

This project analyzed and manipulated data from the non-profit Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED). First, Python was used to strip unneeded fields, narrow the data, and assign new unique IDs. Next, the C++ program read the file into a vector of objects of a custom class, and used several methods to pull out insights, such as trends in targets and locations, and total casualties. A variety of sorting algorithms, trees, and hash functions were compared for space and time efficiency.

• The importance of giving debugging a healthy portion of the time budget (Murphy's Law doesn't mess around)
• Advantages and disadvantages of various data structures and sorting algorithms
• Data sanitization and standardization